[Web4lib] Copyright and Book cover images

[Walker, David]

>> The best source of cover images is 
>> actually the publishers themselves.
 
I disagree.  I don't think 'best' here should be measured in terms of the quality of the images, but rather in terms of the ease of use of the service.
 
To get a cover image from Amazon, all you need is an ISBN.  In almost any system you might design, getting the ISBN for a book and feeding it to Amazon is extremely simple.  (That you need to follow Amazon's terms of service is a given.)
 
Using publisher websites to achieve the same goal would require not only knowing which publishers publish each book, but where their website is located, what data I need to retrieve the book covers, and then a whole host of issues on the size and resolution of each image.  
 
That simply isn't feasible for any type of system searching more than a few hundred books.
 
--Dave
 
-------------------
David Walker
Library Web Services Manager
California State University
http://xerxes.calstate.edu

________________________________

From: web4lib-bounces at webjunction.org on behalf of Steven Jeffery
Sent: Mon 3/12/2007 8:58 AM
To: web4lib at webjunction.org
Subject: Re: [Web4lib] Copyright and Book cover images




Regarding copyright issues it is my understanding that technically* 
you can download and display all the book covers that you want from 
Amazon because it is the publisher that holds the copyright. Amazon is 
likely displaying them under fair use (they probably have agreements 
in place with most publishers but Fair Use would still apply). I 
suspect that any cover images that have Amazon's "look inside" text 
and arrow embedded in them will not be in the same category.

Unless you have a license to use Amazon's bandwidth (AWS), then you 
should not be displaying the images using their bandwidth. The idea 
that many other people are doing it justifies doing it yourself is 
laughable.

The best source of cover images is actually the publishers themselves. 
The larger ones tend to have a system in place that gives you direct 
access to the images. Smaller ones will generally have no issue with 
you downloading them off their website. An advantage to this is that 
the images from the publishers tend to be of much higher 
quality/resolution.


*I say technically because there is likely a clause in the Amazon.com 
usage agreement prohibiting this.



Steven





Quoting Will Kurt <wkurt at bbn.com>:

> I have a question that I've been curious about for awhile, but haven't
> been able to find an answer to.  What are the copyright issues
> regarding the use of book cover images, especially ones from Amazon?
>
> I've noticed a lot of websites (LibraryThing for example) will pull
> images from Amazon, often directly linking to the image hosted on
> Amazon's server.  For obvious reasons using images of book covers can
> be very useful but I was always unclear of the legal/ethical issues
> surrounding this?  If I want to add images of book covers to my library
> website or OPAC is it okay to use Amazon's image covers, if so, is it
> actually preferable to link directly to the Amazon image or would it be
> better to host it locally? Normally I would assume hosting it locally
> would be better due to bandwidth issues, but so many people take the
> images hosted by Amazon I was wondering if perhaps they preferred this?
>
> Or do sites like LibraryThing pay a licensing fee to Amazon or
> something similar?
>
> Are there other routes to obtaining images?
>
> Thanks!
>
> Will
>
> ____________
> Will Kurt
> Research Librarian
> BBN Technologies
> 617-873-8019
> wkurt at bbn.com _______________________________________________
> Web4lib mailing list
> Web4lib at webjunction.org
> http://lists.webjunction.org/web4lib/

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