Generative eBook Covers

http://bibliotique.net/images/080511-aa-1.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

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

I'm not sure I like how the examples provided here look especially, but I think the idea is a good one.

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.

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.... , 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...

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.

http://imgur.com/JvhuomK

http://imgur.com/Ktnec4l

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.