Animated book cover images

What do members feel about the (still small) move to animated GIF book covers?

Example:


See Hachette site: https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/samuel-woolley/the-reality-game/9781541...

I've seen animated album covers for a while now—on iTunes in particular—but not book covers. I have no idea if publishers are already putting this in their ONIX feeds—so they will end up in Bowker data, etc. But I'm interested what members think?

Have you seen them?
Do you want them in your catalog?
Do you want them anywhere?
Where?

I have not seen them.

I do not want them.

I do not want them on a book, I do not want to take a look.
I do not want them on my screen, I do not want them. (Is that mean?)
I do not want them here or there, I do not want them anywhere.

Animation that the user can't control is generally not good for usability and accessibility. I'd much rather see book covers not moving (as in real life...).

I have no objections to animations if they are set to not play by default...

Is that cover animated? It just has occasional staticy effects on the ipad.

It just has occasional staticy effects on the ipad.

Yes, that's the animation.

Some other examples I've found

I'm with lorax on this one. Ugh. I have enough flashy, spinny, ripply, twirly stuff in my online life as it is. Don't make me stay away from the one place that doesn't make me want to gouge my eyes out (except for the bright white screen basically unchangeable by me).

Those in >5 timspalding: are interesting. I hate the one in >1 timspalding: though.

I have one old-fashioned “holographic” cover that I thought I caught well.



The ghost disappears completely at one angle.

>7 2wonderY:

Huh. Never ever seen one of those. Aren't they expensive to make? Does it have that "rough" feel?

>8 timspalding: Yes.

>1 timspalding:
I had not seen them, I wish I still hadn't.
99% of my catalog is paper books so I almost definitely wouldn't have them anyway, but no I do not want them in my catalog.
No, I very much do not want them anywhere. I don't even like seeing the book "covers" that are at an angle, e.g.:


HOWEVER...............if the implementation of animated gif covers would result in other improvements being made to the cover image system (e.g. grouping similar covers, flags on Amazon covers actually doing something, fixing bugs, etc.) then sign me up.

No, please.

I’m with most (all) of the others who’ve answered so far. A big fat NO from me. This feels like the publishing world’s version of 3D films, which I never got the point of (they just made/make movies more expensive and don’t actually bring anything to the table.
Thankfully I only have paper books so most likely won’t have to have them in my catalogue, but it’d annoy me to no end if they started popping up elsewhere on LT (like preview pop-ups, recommendations and plain old book pages).
(Also completely agree with Nora about book covers at an angle.)

No, please. If something attracts my attention by moving on my screen, it better have a good reason. Just "being a book cover" is not a good reason.

There are plenty of improvements that could be made to how covers are handled, this isn't one of them.

Maybe we would need a Geocities-style redesign of the work pages to display animated covers in an appropriate context?
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I haven't seen them on books, but I'll admit that I think the animated album "covers" I see on Apple Music are awesome. They feel weird on books, but I suspect that reflects my age and media history more than anything else. So while it's not *my* world, I see the appeal.

With regard to site design... well, I'll be darned, I just learned with a very little bit of web searching that it's possible to determine whether gifs autoplay or not. I suppose my preference would be to see that as a user-level setting. Folks who would find them an accessibility barrier or just an annoyance should be able to turn them off (and failing that, they probably shouldn't autoplay), but I think if you don't allow them now, you're just buying an ugly conversation in 5 years when the site looks out of step with the publishing world.

Ugh, No. I fully agree with lorax.

As long as they don’t autoplay, I don’t care one way or another. I’d avoid using them in my own catalog.

My knee-jerk reaction is "no, thanks!" because I dislike them, but animated GIFs are everywhere and if LT needs to be able to display them in order to keep up with other sites, then I can cope.

I hate things with automatic sound far more than automatic movement.

Nah.

I'll agree with all the "No" votes, but I'll give another reason: I have extreme motion sickness, and when I looked at that first example, I showed the first signs of trouble. Happily a lot of you had already posted, so I could scroll down fast. But that cover is, literally, sickening.

I wonder if I can file an Americans with Disabilities Act claim: "You must offer the option to turn off covers with motion in them." :-)

I'd like an option to not play animated gifs of any kind.

Twenty some odd years ago I took java off my computer to stop such things.

Definitely no. The first one in particular is very annoying. The other two are at least subtler, but still I don't want them, they are just not aggressively grabbing my attention like the first.

Perhaps it's worth noting here in general that one of the reasons LT is my favorite place on the internet, aside from being a great catalogue for my books, is how at peace I feel while using it. There's nothing constantly trying to grab your attention. I don't mean just ads, I mean any in your face suggestions to check this or that. I do what I want to do at any single moment without constantly being distracted, while at the same time having at my disposal algorithmic suggestions and such when I actually seek those. In case you're not aware what a blessing that is, now you know and thank you for this haven free from attention-grabbing.

I'm not sure the book in post 1 is the best example. I looked up a static version of the cover and it still kind of made me dizzy. I'm not a fan either way, but the examples in post 5 or the lenticular cover just seem kind of gimmicky rather than actively nauseating.

I'm not particularly agin it, but I would hope it would be opt in, for peace and accessibility's sake.

>22 SandraArdnas: I feel the same way about LT. I’m not against moving images and I use gifs regularly, but it’s so nice to be able to get away from things that pop up and are in your face the whole time. LT is a haven.

>1 timspalding: Wow, I didn’t know about this trend. I hate it!

I feel like the animated covers are meant for advertising and gimmicky schmaltz. They are not true covers and should not be treated as such.

Or translated into dumber English: No. Please No.

ETA: I'm going to add an additional thought process which is another reason I fear these covers. If we open the door to GIF covers, people will start requesting GIF responses in reviews and other parts of the site. The minute we get Animated Reviews similar to the crap I see on GR, I'm fully out.

>2 lorax: I'm with lorax on this one. A thousand percent NO.

I do not want them on the site
I do not want them, they're a fright
I do not want an auto-play
I do not like them any way

After my immediate reaction, above.

I guess I wouldn't mind having them on the site if they were in a quarantined gallery somewhere. I almost find the Orpheum one tasteful, and it's a clever effect. But I sure wouldn't want them in regular catalog, review, or recommendation pages, or in my activity feed.

>27 gilroy:

If we start denying covers which are "advertising and gimmicky schmaltz", this is going to become darn close to a text-only site. :-)

Which, in fairness, will decrease both page load times and server disk space requirements. :-)

If they are added (for the record, I'm also with the 'no' votes here), I would humbly request that there is a 'turn gifs ON' setting in user settings.

I ask that it's a turn ON rather than a turn off, an opt-in rather than opt-out, for accessibility reasons — sure, it's an annoyance for someone who wants gifs to have to turn them on before seeing them, but for someone with epilepsy, it's a danger to risk seeing them before turning them off.

And please, please, have that setting turn gif covers off everywhere.

I do not want gifs in Your books,
I fear that they will give me spooks,
nor in my recommendations,
They will give me odd sensations,

I do not want them in a search,
They give my gut a quite strange lurch,
nor in the library of another,
If I see one, I might cry 'mother------'

I do not want them in 'change cover,'
I'm simply not a real gif lover.
A static image suits me best,
They give my eyes and mind a rest.

I do not want gifs, big or small,
I do not want them. Not at all.

>31 GraceCollection:

I ask that it's a turn ON rather than a turn off, an opt-in rather than opt-out, for accessibility reasons — sure, it's an annoyance for someone who wants gifs to have to turn them on before seeing them, but for someone with epilepsy, it's a danger to risk seeing them before turning them off.

And please, please, have that setting turn gif covers off everywhere.

THIS. Always, always, make autoplay opt in. It's easy to set up and a best practice for accessibility.

>2 lorax: Nice poem.

>33 rgurskey: Made me chuckle!

The subtle animations on display in this thread are actually fine with me, I kind of like them, but I'd hate more "in-your-face" animations and since drawing the line is one of those hopeless judgment calls that will end up in disagreements, I think not allowing them is the only reasonable way to go.

>2 lorax: all of the above ;-).

>30 hipdeep: Technically, we can already flag covers that aren't real book covers, so I'm not sure why you say that.

>36 gilroy: but what if the gif flips between a real book cover and something that's not :-)

Maybe appropriate for a book on Schrödingers cat?

>36 gilroy: I think it alludes to many genuine covers being gimmick marketing schmaltz, much like publisher descriptions for that matter.

Agree with others about autoplay off, and see value as an archive (historical record of which animated covers are associated with which books) in a quarantined forum. Would not want these showing up in my catalogue or while reviewing Talk and other pages, however.

So it's decided—moving covers EVERYWHERE!!!!!!

As long as it is optional and off by default.

>40 timspalding: And blinking links like Christmas lights everywhere :D

>42 SandraArdnas: Why leave it at 'like'? Let's add blinking, colourful fairy lights all over. Holidays are coming up anyway, no? Let's get festive, everywhere.

AND DROP THE BORING SMALL LETTERS!!!

Oooh, actually, while we're at it — can we add annoying push notifications? For those of us on the website, we can do pop-ups instead. They can let us know every time someone has commented in a thread we previously commented in, every time there's a new post in a group we're in, every time a friend/enemy/acquaintance adds a new book or writes a new review, every time someone looks at our library... maybe we can even have some that just say something vague but intend to prompt us to get back on the site, like, 'Read any new books lately? *eyes emoji* *open book emoji* *stack of books emoji* Review them now!' or 'timspalding made a new comment, view now!!' or 'LT misses you... you haven't logged in for four hours! *face with tear emoji*' or 'timspalding made 6 new comments, view now!!!'

I want the cursor (when on computer) to have a trail, like in the old Geocities days. Preferably shooting stars or bubbles.

Nah, trailing little books!

>47 Aquila: Nah, trailing little books!

Is that legal under copyright law? :-)

>45 GraceCollection:

'LT misses you... you haven't logged in for four hours! *

You actually log out?

Come back to see what I've missed in this thread and I feel like I have to wade through hip deep sarcasm. It's awesome.

>10 norabelle414: I don't even like seeing the book "covers" that are at an angle

I hate those with a passion.

How about a "like" button so I can like almost every post in this thread?

You're all awesome :)

>10 norabelle414: norabelle414: I don't even like seeing the book "covers" that are at an angle

Now THERE'S a good use for AI—straightening out those damn covers.

>53 timspalding: No AI needed, just let users flag covers as "unappealing" or similar and then downgrade the popularity of the ones that get a lot of flags

>53 timspalding: Hmm I remember making a script once, that placed pictures inside a frame so they appeared to have been glued in by a slightly physically disabled person, i.e. uneven margins and a slighly rotated image inside.

Let's have book covers presented as in our grandparents photo albums :-)

No ... Just NO

One thing I would say is if we do end up with some animated covers further down the line (there will be whinings about this is the cover I use so I fully expect them to arrive on the site at some point if they aren't here already), please can they have a coloured border so they can be spotted easily or given their own category separate from Member and Amazon covers.

>49 lilithcat: You caught me — I just put the computer in 'sleep mode' when I leave for the day! It's still logged in when I come back in.

>54 norabelle414: To be genuine for a moment, I do wish there was some more sorting of covers, especially for classic lit that tends to have about a billion different options to scroll through. If 'cover guess' data is used for Talpa search, surely that data can be used to find covers, or at least 'group' identical/near-identical covers together, so I can scroll through 12 options instead of 50 and then pick the right slight variation or the highest-quality version out of that group.

Or at least sorting/filtering by cover colour, since that's used for Charts & Graphs? I'd also really like if covers could be sorted/filtered by language. My copy of 'Harry Potter' doesn't have a cover in Czech, and I'm sure someone whose copy is in Czech would appreciate being able to look at only Czech covers, although I don't know if 'primary language' is data that is or can be actually attached to a user-uploaded cover.

If nothing else, it would at least be really nice if covers were sorted by highest quality image first down to lowest quality image last. Many more recently added covers that are >1000 pixels in both directions somehow never got the 'high quality' labels that 200x300 crunchy images do have, so the latter shows up before the former. In cases of classic lit with a million cover images total, it shows up way before the former.

>59 GraceCollection: I have been wanting (and asking for) a way to group/sort/filter covers by language for years.

>58 GraceCollection: Even if you shut down your computer, the next time you point your browser at library thing.com you would still be logged in

>61 jjwilson61: That's actually not true for me. My browser is set to clear cookies upon exiting, and shutting down my computer would cause the browser to exit. I do, occasionally, have to shut my computer down for updates and suchlike, and always have to log in to LT again after doing so.

I haven't seen these before. Personally they don't bother me, but I will never use them as I don't buy/catalog digital books (and I don't think I'm going to need animated cover support for my physical books anytime soon).

I tell my friends that if they choose a very easy password, they should at least have a very difficult to guess username. In the same spirit maybe the cover of a very dull book should be animated?

For those who strongly object to animated GIFs (on LT or everywhere?), there are browser plugins like GIF Jam for Chrome which will show only the first frame of a GIF animation.

James

>65 Keeline:

That seems to imply that it wouldn't be too hard to have a "freeze gifs" setting in LT if gif covers became commonplace.

>66 paradoxosalpha: you seem to be under the impression that this behavior can be reliably controlled (across all browsers) from HTML or Javascript from the LT servers. Often times this kind of behavior is best controlled at the browser level (through a plugin).

LT could process GIF images to change them to JPEG, PNG, or WEBP which have no animation. That would be the way to block the behavior entirely. But I'm not sure that they want to keep two illustrations stored for a member option to show them animated or not.

When someone or a smal percentage of members has a special request that is not easily implemented, it should be managed by that person on their browser. This includes color preferences, dark mode, etc.

It is like the old quote:

I strive to change the things that I can change & accept the things that I cannot change.

Using browser configurations and plugins is consistent with this philosophy.

Let the LT developers focus on the hard things and not the little preferences.

James

>67 Keeline: When someone or a smal percentage of members has a special request that is not easily implemented, it should be managed by that person on their browser.

If anything, I think this thread has established that moving gifs are the minority opinion here. Almost every single response was some variation of 'I do not want moving covers' or 'if you add them, give me an option to turn them off.'

So, consistent with your philosophy, we should not put in moving gif covers at all. Let the browsers handle that, then.

Animated covers would actually be useful for some of my books. For example, I have books with optical illusions that change based on the angle you're looking at, or books with covers that have moving components you can use to change their appearance. Animated covers could also accentuate some of the more glossy or shiny elements of some covers, and it's not impossible for a book to have lenticular elements on the cover to produce a holographic effect.

I'm also a purist when it comes to the authoritative data on a book. If the official digital cover provided by the cover for a book is animated, then it should be animated.

I think it'd be nice to at least support them as an option to add to a book in your collection. I'm new to the site, but it doesn't seem like there's a way to set the authoritative cover for a book in common knowledge, so there's no harm in having support for the animation if the default authoritative cover isn't animated. Maybe add next to the "change cover" link a little "make animated" button for people who'd prefer it.

Although, animations help catch the attention of my ADHD brain, so I guess I'm already predisposed to liking them.

>69 bibsteve: I'm also a purist when it comes to the authoritative data on a book. If the official digital cover provided by the cover for a book is animated, then it should be animated.

I think there is a little bit of misunderstanding here. (Understandable, if you're new.) What is an "official" cover? Look at something like the Iliad. It was probably originally oral. The first written copy no longer exists. In fact, it is unlikely that any of the first thousand copies exist. Our most authoritative copies are probably at least twenty generations from the first copy that was taken down. And there have been numerous translations, and zillions of editions. What would an official cover be for the Iliad? Or even of Chapman's edition of the same? Such questions also apply, to a lesser degree, to almost anything popular, be it Alice's Adventures in Wonderland or King Lear (do you want the folio, or the quarto? Which quarto?) or even The Hobbit.

You could associate a cover with a particular ISBN or other identification number, but even then, it's tricky. Suppose someone buys the edition you have in a hardcover with a slipcover -- and loses the cover? Now the cover is different.

This is why you get to choose, and upload, your own covers: To get the one you want. Now obviously it makes sense for you to get the cover that matches your particular e-book. But if I don't have an e-book version (and I find e-books very hard to read), and if animated covers make me sick (as one of the examples here does), shouldn't there at least be an option to not see them?

It might make sense to segregate print from e-book covers, but I don't think we have the data for that.

>69 bibsteve: There's really no authoritative data on covers since publishers often change the cover between editions without changing the ISBN. Amazon routinely changes kindle covers between editions and you don't even have a say which one it will show. You might have bought one with one cover, but when a new edition comes around with a movie image, it will change to that (One of the many reasons I'll never buy a kindle device).

As far as choice of default cover assigned automatically on LT, it depends on either ISBN or ASIN. It assigns the most popular one per ISBN automatically, so the 'authority' comes from number of uses. Without either of those, it does not assign any and you have to choose an existing one yourself or upload one if there's no appropriate cover.

If animated covers are permitted as a user-uploaded option, they should NEVER be selected as "most popular" at any level (ISBN, ASIN, or work-level).