[Web4lib] Thumbnails for online books

[Danielle Plumer]

Now that the furor over Google Book Search has died down a bit...

One thing I like about their search is the way they're displaying thumbnails with the cover and a couple of images to make the "books" seem three-dimensional. Do any other systems have a display like this?

I've been looking for freeware (preferably open-source) to batch-create thumbnails from the first pages of PDF documents for a couple of large collections. I don't know if Google is doing that on the fly or if they've created the thumbnails as part of their process, but the overall effect is quite nice.

Danielle Cunniff Plumer, Coordinator
Texas Heritage Digitization Initiative
Texas State Library and Archives Commission
512.463.5852 (phone) / 512.936.2306 (fax)
dplumer at tsl.state.tx.us