6 ms·

Generative eBook Covers

160 points by gluejar 12y ago

sungeuns 12y ago
Cool stufft, I just thinking that if you using topic modeling algorithm like LDA, then generate more informative covers :)
teach 12y ago
Is there an online demo? Would love to play with this! (And I swear it's not just because I currently have an eBook without a cover....)
- riordan 12y ago
  For ebooks without images [10Print inspired]: https://github.com/mgiraldo/tenprintcover-p5 https://github.com/mgiraldo/tenprintcover-p5 For ebooks with images [Gutenberg]: https://github.com/mgiraldo/tenprintcover-p5 https://github.com/mgiraldo/tenprintcover-p5
userbinator 12y ago
Those really abstract covers are quite Identicon-like (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identicon http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identicon ). This also reminds me of the autogenerated covers on the (ridiculously overpriced) books containing only Wikipedia articles, which were equally generic-looking but still somewhat relevant (e.g. https://images.our-assets.com/fullcover/2000x/9786131724619.jpg https://images.our-assets.com/fullcover/2000x/9786131724619.... , http://www.amazon.com/Aisle-Frederic-P-Miller/dp/B009CKDZII/ http://www.amazon.com/Aisle-Frederic-P-Miller/dp/B009CKDZII/ ) Of course, I think the saying "Don't judge an eBook by its cover" also applies...
arjie 12y ago
In my opinion, those geometric shape covers are some of the ugliest things I've ever seen.
- TheCoreh 12y ago
  I think the problem is with the color relationship. The resulting shape is actually pretty cool.
  - tripzilch 12y ago
    Agree. Picking complementary colours 180 degrees separated in HSL space almost always creates an (IMO) clashing combination. 102 degrees would have been more sensible, while providing sufficient contrast. Using a different, more perceptually-based colour space would be even better.
    - mga 12y ago
      Fortunately the code is available for you to play with: https://github.com/mgiraldo/tenprintcover-p5 https://github.com/mgiraldo/tenprintcover-p5 This other project has some interesting geometric explorations: http://variable.io/generative-covers/ http://variable.io/generative-covers/
- MrBuddyCasino 12y ago
  Agreed, they remind me of 70s psychology books: https://www.google.de/search?q=seventies+psychology&safe=off&es_sm=91&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=sjkIVMecK4OoO_TqgbAM&ved=0CAgQ_AUoAQ&biw=1440&bih=779 https://www.google.de/search?q=seventies+psychology&safe=off... I hereby coin the term "depressionism" - you heard it here first, folks!
walterbell 12y ago
If the purpose of covers is to visually differentiate among the set of books which are visible in a skeumorphic "bookshelf", could pre-computed image similarity metrics be used to maximize the difference between neighboring titles?
TheCoreh 12y ago
I specially liked the illustration ones. I wonder if perhaps some database of public art illustrations could be somehow consulted to generate covers for the books without illustrations?
- Turing_Machine 12y ago
  https://www.flickr.com/photos/internetarchivebookimages/with/14784850762/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/internetarchivebookimages/with... might be a good start. These are images auto-extracted from public domain books at the Internet Archive.
bane 12y ago
I applaud this effort from the sense that generated book covers all seem to be so ugly and undesigned. There's nothing wrong with a generic, but well designed book cover. I mean, how many virtually identical hardbound books are there sitting on people's bookshelves...and they look beautiful instead of ugly. http://bibliotique.net/images/080511-aa-1.jpg http://bibliotique.net/images/080511-aa-1.jpg http://www.dargate.com/cat/248_auction/248_images/1722.jpg http://www.dargate.com/cat/248_auction/248_images/1722.jpg The difference is that there is some sense of trying to make them at least a little eye pleasing. Decent fonts, some pretty gold leaf designs. This is not good enough http://i.imgur.com/YqjnSsF.png http://i.imgur.com/YqjnSsF.png Some kind of more clever generative art I think is called for. It should even have some kind of sensible themeing, like all books from the same author look kind of alike or something. http://graywolfseo.com/wp-content/uploads/library-shelf.jpg http://graywolfseo.com/wp-content/uploads/library-shelf.jpg I'm not sure I like how the examples provided here look especially, but I think the idea is a good one.
- gioele 12y ago
  Reclam Verlag may be the best example of beauty coming out of minimalistic, well designed book covers: http://sprachkreis-deutsch.ch/2013/06/30/reclam-verlag-folgt-den-sok-empfehlungen/ http://sprachkreis-deutsch.ch/2013/06/30/reclam-verlag-folgt... http://www.phantasienreisen.de/2012/02/19/reclam-klassiker-im-neuen-look/ http://www.phantasienreisen.de/2012/02/19/reclam-klassiker-i... Book wall: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Reclam_Universalbibliothekwand.jpg http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Reclam_Universalbibli...
  - Genmutant 12y ago
    They replaced the old design? I liked that more. But I didn't know they had ones which are not yellow. Do you know what the different colors mean?
    - derrasterpunkt 12y ago
      yellow: classic works of the German language and other languages translated into German red: classics in their original foreign language orange: bi-lingual books blue: study guides green: original historical sources with explanations magenta: non-fiction (politics, history, society, natural sciences, art, music or religion) source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reclam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reclam
tjradcliffe 12y ago
Both cover design and interior layout are insanely challenging. I run a small press (everybody needs a hobby: http://www.siduri.net http://www.siduri.net) and the amount of time spent on covers is way out of proportion to everything else. In an ideal world, the artist has to a) understand the book and b) create a cover that sums it up and c) produce an alternative version that isn't too heavy for the e-book. The difference between e-book requirements and print are huge, and a few of the recent Penguin e-books I've bought all have the same cover (the Penguin logo) which looks to me like the editors just punted on the issue. So I applaud this effort. The problem they are solving is much more difficult than it looks from the outside, and they are doing an impressive job even though the results may look less than ideal to some. Things like Project Gutenberg would be considerably enhanced if they had decent covers, and any scheme for auto-generating them that isn't positively awful [] would really help. [] I've gotta say the first purely geometric covers in the article aren't quite my cup of tea.
- Genmutant 12y ago
  I like the O´Reilly books, they just use a different animal on the cover for each book.
- gluejar 12y ago
  Based on the "publicatations" on your web site, you should spend less time on covers and more on spell checking. (Sorry, I hope that's not too mean.)
- mga 12y ago
  Thanks for the words of support! These are two other interesting generative cover projects: http://variable.io/generative-covers/ http://variable.io/generative-covers/ http://www.creativereview.co.uk/cr-blog/2008/july/faber-finds-generative-book-covers http://www.creativereview.co.uk/cr-blog/2008/july/faber-find... Worth noting our effort is mostly a side project that supports the _real_ project which is the ebook reader app
Johnythree 12y ago
As a avid reader (and collector) of old books, one thing I hate is these fake computer generated book covers. If no cover is available, I would much prefer a simple text label. When I do find such a book, I waste no time in stripping off the cover. Putting a fake cover on an old book is akin to vandalism.
kalops 12y ago
This reminds me of a Scott Adam's blog: http://www.dilbert.com/blog/entry/scotts_book_cover_design_challenge/ http://www.dilbert.com/blog/entry/scotts_book_cover_design_c...
akavel 12y ago
Made me remember a series of books from '70s-'90s in Poland (about computer programming), somewhat similar in style, although I thought they were more so before googling. In case you'd be interested: http://imgur.com/JvhuomK http://imgur.com/JvhuomK http://imgur.com/Ktnec4l http://imgur.com/Ktnec4l
- userbinator 12y ago
  On first glance, those look almost like an Arabic letter. I suppose that for more abstract topics like programming, an abstract-looking cover is pretty common. Also similar, this set of famous theoretical physics books: http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-sj0HK_o3hD0/TlhDu7sl_FI/AAAAAAAAAho/UsejTjAdNcc/s1600/Course+Of+Theoretical+Physics+%2528Landau+and+Lifshitz%2529.jpg http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-sj0HK_o3hD0/TlhDu7sl_FI/AAAAAAAAAh...
  - walterbell 12y ago
    These are a great balance of similarity and differentiation. Is there software which models the human perceptual system, e.g. algorithms that have been trained on fanous art? Related: http://thecreatorsproject.vice.com/blog/an-intelligent-algorithm-made-a-discovery-that-slipped-past-art-historians-for-years http://thecreatorsproject.vice.com/blog/an-intelligent-algor... "For their research, the team chose 1,700 paintings by 66 artists, covering the 15th to the late 20th century. Using a technique that analyzes visual concepts called "classemes"—wherein objects, color shades, subjects' movement, and more are marked—the researchers created a list of 3,000 classemes for each painting, data which The Physics arXiv Blog compares to a vector. Then, they used an artificially intelligent algorithm to evaluate the vectors and look for similarities or overlapping qualities among the 1,700 paintings. ArXiv adds, "To create a ground truth against which to measure their results, they also collate expert opinions on which these artists have influenced the others."
nl 12y ago
I wonder if it would be possible to generate a cover based on the plot? Character name detection is pretty easy Gender detection for the characters depends on the year of the book, but is possible with reasonable accuracy (although one would need to be careful of translations). Key scene detection in text isn't something I know much about. I've read some research on recognising emotion in text, and it might be possible to use something like that on a rolling basis to find the most important parts of the book. Using that information to create an illustration... would be challenging. I can imagine algorithms to draw the character by extracting descriptions from the book. Putting them into the context described by some key scene would have a few additional problems.
- walterbell 12y ago
  There was a "book genome project", but recently acquired by Apple and shut down. http://www.tapor.ca/?id=349 http://www.tapor.ca/?id=349 http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-buys-booklamp-2014-7 http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-buys-booklamp-2014-7

160 points by gluejar 12y ago

Cool stufft, I just thinking that if you using topic modeling algorithm like LDA, then generate more informative covers :)

teach 12y ago

Is there an online demo? Would love to play with this! (And I swear it's not just because I currently have an eBook without a cover....)

riordan 12y ago
For ebooks without images [10Print inspired]: https://github.com/mgiraldo/tenprintcover-p5 https://github.com/mgiraldo/tenprintcover-p5 For ebooks with images [Gutenberg]: https://github.com/mgiraldo/tenprintcover-p5 https://github.com/mgiraldo/tenprintcover-p5

userbinator 12y ago

Those really abstract covers are quite Identicon-like (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identicon http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identicon ). This also reminds me of the autogenerated covers on the (ridiculously overpriced) books containing only Wikipedia articles, which were equally generic-looking but still somewhat relevant (e.g. https://images.our-assets.com/fullcover/2000x/9786131724619.jpg https://images.our-assets.com/fullcover/2000x/9786131724619.... , http://www.amazon.com/Aisle-Frederic-P-Miller/dp/B009CKDZII/ http://www.amazon.com/Aisle-Frederic-P-Miller/dp/B009CKDZII/ ) Of course, I think the saying "Don't judge an eBook by its cover" also applies...

arjie 12y ago

In my opinion, those geometric shape covers are some of the ugliest things I've ever seen.

TheCoreh 12y ago
I think the problem is with the color relationship. The resulting shape is actually pretty cool.
- tripzilch 12y ago
  Agree. Picking complementary colours 180 degrees separated in HSL space almost always creates an (IMO) clashing combination. 102 degrees would have been more sensible, while providing sufficient contrast. Using a different, more perceptually-based colour space would be even better.
  - mga 12y ago
    Fortunately the code is available for you to play with: https://github.com/mgiraldo/tenprintcover-p5 https://github.com/mgiraldo/tenprintcover-p5 This other project has some interesting geometric explorations: http://variable.io/generative-covers/ http://variable.io/generative-covers/
MrBuddyCasino 12y ago
Agreed, they remind me of 70s psychology books: https://www.google.de/search?q=seventies+psychology&safe=off&es_sm=91&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=sjkIVMecK4OoO_TqgbAM&ved=0CAgQ_AUoAQ&biw=1440&bih=779 https://www.google.de/search?q=seventies+psychology&safe=off... I hereby coin the term "depressionism" - you heard it here first, folks!

walterbell 12y ago

If the purpose of covers is to visually differentiate among the set of books which are visible in a skeumorphic "bookshelf", could pre-computed image similarity metrics be used to maximize the difference between neighboring titles?

TheCoreh 12y ago

I specially liked the illustration ones. I wonder if perhaps some database of public art illustrations could be somehow consulted to generate covers for the books without illustrations?

Turing_Machine 12y ago
https://www.flickr.com/photos/internetarchivebookimages/with/14784850762/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/internetarchivebookimages/with... might be a good start. These are images auto-extracted from public domain books at the Internet Archive.

bane 12y ago

I applaud this effort from the sense that generated book covers all seem to be so ugly and undesigned. There's nothing wrong with a generic, but well designed book cover. I mean, how many virtually identical hardbound books are there sitting on people's bookshelves...and they look beautiful instead of ugly. http://bibliotique.net/images/080511-aa-1.jpg http://bibliotique.net/images/080511-aa-1.jpg http://www.dargate.com/cat/248_auction/248_images/1722.jpg http://www.dargate.com/cat/248_auction/248_images/1722.jpg The difference is that there is some sense of trying to make them at least a little eye pleasing. Decent fonts, some pretty gold leaf designs. This is not good enough http://i.imgur.com/YqjnSsF.png http://i.imgur.com/YqjnSsF.png Some kind of more clever generative art I think is called for. It should even have some kind of sensible themeing, like all books from the same author look kind of alike or something. http://graywolfseo.com/wp-content/uploads/library-shelf.jpg http://graywolfseo.com/wp-content/uploads/library-shelf.jpg I'm not sure I like how the examples provided here look especially, but I think the idea is a good one.

gioele 12y ago
Reclam Verlag may be the best example of beauty coming out of minimalistic, well designed book covers: http://sprachkreis-deutsch.ch/2013/06/30/reclam-verlag-folgt-den-sok-empfehlungen/ http://sprachkreis-deutsch.ch/2013/06/30/reclam-verlag-folgt... http://www.phantasienreisen.de/2012/02/19/reclam-klassiker-im-neuen-look/ http://www.phantasienreisen.de/2012/02/19/reclam-klassiker-i... Book wall: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Reclam_Universalbibliothekwand.jpg http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Reclam_Universalbibli...
- Genmutant 12y ago
  They replaced the old design? I liked that more. But I didn't know they had ones which are not yellow. Do you know what the different colors mean?
  - derrasterpunkt 12y ago
    yellow: classic works of the German language and other languages translated into German red: classics in their original foreign language orange: bi-lingual books blue: study guides green: original historical sources with explanations magenta: non-fiction (politics, history, society, natural sciences, art, music or religion) source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reclam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reclam

tjradcliffe 12y ago

Both cover design and interior layout are insanely challenging. I run a small press (everybody needs a hobby: http://www.siduri.net http://www.siduri.net) and the amount of time spent on covers is way out of proportion to everything else. In an ideal world, the artist has to a) understand the book and b) create a cover that sums it up and c) produce an alternative version that isn't too heavy for the e-book. The difference between e-book requirements and print are huge, and a few of the recent Penguin e-books I've bought all have the same cover (the Penguin logo) which looks to me like the editors just punted on the issue. So I applaud this effort. The problem they are solving is much more difficult than it looks from the outside, and they are doing an impressive job even though the results may look less than ideal to some. Things like Project Gutenberg would be considerably enhanced if they had decent covers, and any scheme for auto-generating them that isn't positively awful [] would really help. [] I've gotta say the first purely geometric covers in the article aren't quite my cup of tea.

Genmutant 12y ago
I like the O´Reilly books, they just use a different animal on the cover for each book.
gluejar 12y ago
Based on the "publicatations" on your web site, you should spend less time on covers and more on spell checking. (Sorry, I hope that's not too mean.)
mga 12y ago
Thanks for the words of support! These are two other interesting generative cover projects: http://variable.io/generative-covers/ http://variable.io/generative-covers/ http://www.creativereview.co.uk/cr-blog/2008/july/faber-finds-generative-book-covers http://www.creativereview.co.uk/cr-blog/2008/july/faber-find... Worth noting our effort is mostly a side project that supports the _real_ project which is the ebook reader app

Johnythree 12y ago

As a avid reader (and collector) of old books, one thing I hate is these fake computer generated book covers. If no cover is available, I would much prefer a simple text label. When I do find such a book, I waste no time in stripping off the cover. Putting a fake cover on an old book is akin to vandalism.

kalops 12y ago

This reminds me of a Scott Adam's blog: http://www.dilbert.com/blog/entry/scotts_book_cover_design_challenge/ http://www.dilbert.com/blog/entry/scotts_book_cover_design_c...

akavel 12y ago

Made me remember a series of books from '70s-'90s in Poland (about computer programming), somewhat similar in style, although I thought they were more so before googling. In case you'd be interested: http://imgur.com/JvhuomK http://imgur.com/JvhuomK http://imgur.com/Ktnec4l http://imgur.com/Ktnec4l

userbinator 12y ago
On first glance, those look almost like an Arabic letter. I suppose that for more abstract topics like programming, an abstract-looking cover is pretty common. Also similar, this set of famous theoretical physics books: http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-sj0HK_o3hD0/TlhDu7sl_FI/AAAAAAAAAho/UsejTjAdNcc/s1600/Course+Of+Theoretical+Physics+%2528Landau+and+Lifshitz%2529.jpg http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-sj0HK_o3hD0/TlhDu7sl_FI/AAAAAAAAAh...
- walterbell 12y ago
  These are a great balance of similarity and differentiation. Is there software which models the human perceptual system, e.g. algorithms that have been trained on fanous art? Related: http://thecreatorsproject.vice.com/blog/an-intelligent-algorithm-made-a-discovery-that-slipped-past-art-historians-for-years http://thecreatorsproject.vice.com/blog/an-intelligent-algor... "For their research, the team chose 1,700 paintings by 66 artists, covering the 15th to the late 20th century. Using a technique that analyzes visual concepts called "classemes"—wherein objects, color shades, subjects' movement, and more are marked—the researchers created a list of 3,000 classemes for each painting, data which The Physics arXiv Blog compares to a vector. Then, they used an artificially intelligent algorithm to evaluate the vectors and look for similarities or overlapping qualities among the 1,700 paintings. ArXiv adds, "To create a ground truth against which to measure their results, they also collate expert opinions on which these artists have influenced the others."

nl 12y ago

I wonder if it would be possible to generate a cover based on the plot? Character name detection is pretty easy Gender detection for the characters depends on the year of the book, but is possible with reasonable accuracy (although one would need to be careful of translations). Key scene detection in text isn't something I know much about. I've read some research on recognising emotion in text, and it might be possible to use something like that on a rolling basis to find the most important parts of the book. Using that information to create an illustration... would be challenging. I can imagine algorithms to draw the character by extracting descriptions from the book. Putting them into the context described by some key scene would have a few additional problems.

walterbell 12y ago
There was a "book genome project", but recently acquired by Apple and shut down. http://www.tapor.ca/?id=349 http://www.tapor.ca/?id=349 http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-buys-booklamp-2014-7 http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-buys-booklamp-2014-7