Comments on: Searching for books by the colour of the cover

By: Book covers, revisited » "Self-plagiarism is style"

Book covers, revisited » "Self-plagiarism is style" — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 19:36:07 +0000

[...] spotted that Tim is busy working on something that I dabbled with last [...]

By: Alex

Alex — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 15:58:06 +0000

Wonderful idea - I sort my own books like this - I thought it was unusual until I was sitting in the rare books room of a university library next to a distinguished manuscripts scholar. He had ordered a book and it hadn't arrived. He collared the assistant and pointed out that the book was easy to find as it had a red cover. Some time later the book arrived. Without a red cover. Instead of being grateful, the scholar observed, in dissatistisied tones 'I see, you only have the green edition'…

By: Searching for books by their color . . . « Turning Pages - The USCA Library Blog

Fri, 28 Sep 2007 13:16:29 +0000

[...] Christie See this interesting post with a search engine that allows you to find a book by color: http://www.daveyp.com/blog/index.php/archives/170/ Note that you need to know hex values for the colors, you can see those here: [...]

By: Dave Pattern

Dave Pattern — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 12:17:16 +0000

Hi Venus — if you sign up to Amazon Web Services, then you can get details about a specific book as an XML page:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aws/landing.html

The XML page can include things like: links to a book cover scan; reviews; book suggestions; etc

By: Venus Goody

Venus Goody — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 05:22:24 +0000

This is an excellent work.

can I access the catalogued iformation of a particular book from the Amazon's book collection, when I search on its ISBN No.?

Please guide,

Venus

By: Dave Pattern

Dave Pattern — Mon, 21 May 2007 20:26:46 +0000

heh heh — as Marguerite Duras once said, "The best way to fill time is to waste it."

By: phrebh

phrebh — Mon, 21 May 2007 14:05:38 +0000

This is great! I mean, the time and effort that must have gone into an essentially useless, although really cool, tool really speaks to my own, vast wastes of time.

By: Edward Vielmetti

Edward Vielmetti — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 06:10:29 +0000

One more color space to consider:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L*a*b

which looks like it might shelve the books more nicely - the math to convert from RGB to LAB is a bit tricker but still looks straightforward once you make an assumption or two.

By: Dave Pattern

Dave Pattern — Sun, 22 Apr 2007 08:55:22 +0000

Good question! I did look at this when I was playing around with colours, but couldn't find an easy way of doing it.

I've added an extra parameter to the script so that it will return the HSL value(s) rather than the RGB value(s) — just add the following to any of the URLs:

…&colorspace=HSL

e.g.:

http://library.hud.ac.uk/balti/bookcolor.pl?isbn=0545010225&colorspace=HSL

By: Edward Vielmetti

Edward Vielmetti — Sun, 22 Apr 2007 05:31:31 +0000

OK Dave, I got it working here - wrapped it in a script at

http://www.superpatron.com/wall-of-books/book-color.sh

which you can run as
% book-color.sh 0545010225
A47145

It doesn't do anything more than the minimum, just wraps the interface you have in a script.

The next bit I'm stuck on is more color theory than anything else. How do you sort RGB values into a rainbow? Obviously sorting on the hex code gives you the wrong answer (it sorts by % red), and there's some color calculus to arrange those numbers along a pleasing line, but my initial searches stumped me. I found formulas for "hue" and "luminance" and will try those.