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I have recently been reading more VERY old literature, and this has resulted quite a few times in my only convenient source for an epub file being Project Gutenberg. I've noticed more and more of these INCREDIBLY ugly covers popping up recently, until finally a few months ago in exasperation I tried to google to find out what was behind them (not that knowing would help anything).
They are truly so awful - see the below screenshot of my ereader app's library - that I thought people would be talking about them everywhere! I only found this one result, though. The basic concept is reminiscent of the famous colorblocked Penguin classics, except instead of a block of color, there's a grid of geometric shapes in two oversaturated complementary colors selected from a colorwheel. (I did find out that the shapes are generated on the basis of the letters in the cover, but as someone else said in the thread, it doesn't really matter how inventive or intriguing the coding is if the result is guaranteed to be painful to look at.)
L: my ebook library contaminated with hideous eyesore autogenerated covers. R: my ebook library showing a couple of their replacements from Calibre and one that I made with my own two hands in Gnu Image Manipulation Program
As a result, each cover is unique, but you still can't distinguish the images at a glance because the generated images all basically look the same. For accessibility, it's no different than if the covers were all identical, say, a rectangle of black or navy blue or whatever with the text box at the top (except that at least that way your eyes wouldn't be bleeding.)
I read ebooks on my phone, so it's usually easiest to download new ones directly to it and put them on the computer to be cataloged with Calibre after the fact, if at all. But when it takes a long time to read a book, I have to see it in the library more times, and it got so irritating that today I connected my phone to the laptop with a cable just to move all the books into Calibre, generate or fetch covers for the offenders using Calibre's handy buttons in the Edit Metadata dialogue, and then move them back to my phone. (You can see some of Calibre's autogenerated covers in the second image - "Arthurian Romances" (that one is Chrétien de Troyes) and Maria Edgeworth's collected "Tales and Novels Volume 09" on the top row, which I haven't had a chance to read yet, but I was intrigued by a mention by Walter Scott in the introduction to Waverley.
There's one cover there that I actually made myself. Some Experiences of an Irish R.M. is a comic novel by the prolific lesbian suffragist life-partner and writing partner duo of Anglo-Irish writers known as Somerville and Ross, Edith Œnone Somerville and Violet Florence Martin, who wrote as "E.Œ. Somerville and Martin Ross". The book was published in 1899. The pair met in the 1880s, and came to share a home in County Cork. According to this page (one of the sources on wikipedia) they considered themselves married! (Good for them!!!) Take a look at this fantastic picture:
By Internet Archive Book Images - https://www.flickr.com/photos/internetarchivebookimages/14576668347/ Source book page: https://archive.org/stream/irishmemories00some/irishmemories00some#page/n246/mode/1up, No restrictions, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=44555004
What happened was that as I was reading the Mapp and Lucia novels, I couldn't quite remember the names of the actresses who played the principals in the older adaptation (I looked it up later). But I had an image in my head of a character from a particular episode of Agatha Christe's Poirot - "Dead Man's Mirror" (1993)'s Miss Lingard, who turned out to have been played by Fiona Walker (completely different actress). So I clicked on her name because there wasn't a picture, and her article said she was primarily known for a couple of things including a tv show called "The Irish R.M." I immediately thought, ooh, is this a popular vintage Irish tv show? Tell me more! (I would love to watch an Irish comedy, but turns out for the show they made the title character British; in the books he is Irish as well.) Wikipedia informed me it was based on Victorian comedic novels about an Anglo-Irish ex-military officer who takes a post as magistrate in rural Ireland, and the author page introduced me to the fascinating authors, and I was like YES, I HAVE TO READ THIS!!! And I've read a couple of chapters so far. It is indeed funny. Not Wodehouse level; it's more sort of James Thurber-y.
It deserved better than the Calibre autogenerated covers, so I downloaded an image and put the text on it myself.
They are truly so awful - see the below screenshot of my ereader app's library - that I thought people would be talking about them everywhere! I only found this one result, though. The basic concept is reminiscent of the famous colorblocked Penguin classics, except instead of a block of color, there's a grid of geometric shapes in two oversaturated complementary colors selected from a colorwheel. (I did find out that the shapes are generated on the basis of the letters in the cover, but as someone else said in the thread, it doesn't really matter how inventive or intriguing the coding is if the result is guaranteed to be painful to look at.)
L: my ebook library contaminated with hideous eyesore autogenerated covers. R: my ebook library showing a couple of their replacements from Calibre and one that I made with my own two hands in Gnu Image Manipulation Program
As a result, each cover is unique, but you still can't distinguish the images at a glance because the generated images all basically look the same. For accessibility, it's no different than if the covers were all identical, say, a rectangle of black or navy blue or whatever with the text box at the top (except that at least that way your eyes wouldn't be bleeding.)
I read ebooks on my phone, so it's usually easiest to download new ones directly to it and put them on the computer to be cataloged with Calibre after the fact, if at all. But when it takes a long time to read a book, I have to see it in the library more times, and it got so irritating that today I connected my phone to the laptop with a cable just to move all the books into Calibre, generate or fetch covers for the offenders using Calibre's handy buttons in the Edit Metadata dialogue, and then move them back to my phone. (You can see some of Calibre's autogenerated covers in the second image - "Arthurian Romances" (that one is Chrétien de Troyes) and Maria Edgeworth's collected "Tales and Novels Volume 09" on the top row, which I haven't had a chance to read yet, but I was intrigued by a mention by Walter Scott in the introduction to Waverley.
There's one cover there that I actually made myself. Some Experiences of an Irish R.M. is a comic novel by the prolific lesbian suffragist life-partner and writing partner duo of Anglo-Irish writers known as Somerville and Ross, Edith Œnone Somerville and Violet Florence Martin, who wrote as "E.Œ. Somerville and Martin Ross". The book was published in 1899. The pair met in the 1880s, and came to share a home in County Cork. According to this page (one of the sources on wikipedia) they considered themselves married! (Good for them!!!) Take a look at this fantastic picture:
By Internet Archive Book Images - https://www.flickr.com/photos/internetarchivebookimages/14576668347/ Source book page: https://archive.org/stream/irishmemories00some/irishmemories00some#page/n246/mode/1up, No restrictions, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=44555004
What happened was that as I was reading the Mapp and Lucia novels, I couldn't quite remember the names of the actresses who played the principals in the older adaptation (I looked it up later). But I had an image in my head of a character from a particular episode of Agatha Christe's Poirot - "Dead Man's Mirror" (1993)'s Miss Lingard, who turned out to have been played by Fiona Walker (completely different actress). So I clicked on her name because there wasn't a picture, and her article said she was primarily known for a couple of things including a tv show called "The Irish R.M." I immediately thought, ooh, is this a popular vintage Irish tv show? Tell me more! (I would love to watch an Irish comedy, but turns out for the show they made the title character British; in the books he is Irish as well.) Wikipedia informed me it was based on Victorian comedic novels about an Anglo-Irish ex-military officer who takes a post as magistrate in rural Ireland, and the author page introduced me to the fascinating authors, and I was like YES, I HAVE TO READ THIS!!! And I've read a couple of chapters so far. It is indeed funny. Not Wodehouse level; it's more sort of James Thurber-y.
It deserved better than the Calibre autogenerated covers, so I downloaded an image and put the text on it myself.
