Legal Woes

shiflett on 2003-03-18T20:06:21

I noticed on Amazon.com recently that my book was shown with a different cover than I had seen before. I asked my AE about this and for some sample art if it had changed, so that I could make the companion Web site match.

The response I received was very odd. The image used on the cover is "Rights Managed" and can't be used anywhere except on the cover. However, Amazon.com has both small and large images of the cover. So, after speaking with my AE further (mentioning online bookstores and their use of the image), it sounds like I can use the images from Amazon.com without any problem. So, I will just use those and try to clean them up with gimp as well as I can. This whole situation seems quite odd.

Oh, and I guess this is what I get for being lazy and using Geoff's favicon on my site. Now I have to make my own. :-)

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know thy amazon

geoff on 2003-03-19T01:14:42

you can play around with amazon's on-the-fly imaging to find something that you don't need to edit. for instance, this is an image without the 30% off marker, and if you change the PE00 to PE15 you'll magically see 15% off. you can also get the thumbnail by changing the M (medium I guess) to T, or change that to an L for the large image. I'd store them all in a safe place in case amazon changes its scheme around :)

anyway, I'm sorry to hear about the cover. I personally favor the split cover and don't much care for the rock/house/waterfall bit. but I don't have to worry about it either - people have to actually buy the book in order for them to change mine :)

Re:know thy amazon

shiflett on 2003-03-19T17:14:44

Thanks for the tutorial. :-)

The reason I don't care for Amazon's images is that the quality is just fair. Even with the highest resolution image, the color is uneven and the text is blurred. I did find a better image that I can probably clean up well enough to use for various artwork on the site, but it would have been more convenient to get the artwork straight from the source.