It’s Time for Publishers to Sort All Their Cover Art

BoingBoing co-founder Cory Doctorow has a great idea that promises “a practically zero-cost way for publishers to sell more books, get better market-intelligence, and get better control over the collateral used to sell their products online.” It’s so straightforward, it’s worth simply quoting directly:

“Publishers should create default directories called ‘covers’ at their server-root (e.g., tor.com/covers, harpercollins.co.uk/covers, etc) filled with high-rez PNGs or JPGs (or both) named after the book’s ISBN … Tweak your robots.txt file to make sure the search-engines all crawl these directories, so when you search on images.google.com or images.yahoo.com for an ISBN, the publisher’s high-rez would be right there at the top.”

This way, when bloggers want to illustrate a post with the cover art from the book they’re talking about, they’ve got an easy, reliable way to do it. This would be a great feature: Yes, it’s true, you can already use Amazon.com as an industry-wide cover art gallery, but that doesn’t always work, especially once the online bookseller slaps its “Search Inside!” branding over the artwork. And, as Doctorow points out, any publishers who take the initiative on this front will be able to collect some potentially useful data on who’s interested in their books…

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