Category talk:Non-free images of book covers/Archive 1

Archive 1

Amazon covers

Many book covers are sourced from Amazon. I don’t know the legal implications of this, but I presume that it is ok.

Here’s how to do it!

The URL format is as follows; the cover for King Matt (2nd US edition, 2004), can be obtained at:

http://images.amazon.com/images/P/1565124421.1.L.jpg

• For other books, change 1565124421 to the 10-digit ISBN of the book.
• You can change 1 (US) to 2 (UK), 3 (Germany), 8 (France), 9 (Japan) for other editions.

The URL should then be included in the source field of the description.

In more detail, this is analyzed as:

Base URL

http://images.amazon.com/images/P/

ASIN/ISBN-10

1565124421

Amazon ID; for books, the 10-digit ISBN

Country code

1

The country or national edition; 1 or 01 = (US), 2 (UK), 3 (Germany), 8 (France), 9 (Japan).

Size/commands

L

This can be very complicated (see references), but L (“Large”) is a good size – high enough resolution to be usable, low enough to be acceptable under (current) Wikipedia fair use guidelines.

Extension

jpg

Doesn’t matter or change format – it’s always JPEG

For more details:

References

• Using cover images from Amazon, by ellermann, 2006-04-15
• Abusing Amazon images, by Nat Gertler, created May 21, 2005. Last updated February 14, 2010.

Hope this helps!

—Nils von Barth (nbarth) (talk) 23:16, 21 May 2010 (UTC)

Link to cover. —Nils von Barth (nbarth) (talk) 05:31, 5 March 2012 (UTC)

Amazon covers are often less than ideal because they put watermarks saying "Copyrighted Material" on the top and bottom of the image. Sometimes customers upload images of decent quality to Amazon, but often times better quality images can be found using a basic image search (Google's). Authors' websites often have high quality renderings of book covers as well. Gobōnobo ^{+ c} 01:45, 23 August 2012 (UTC)