How do you use the cover color data?

Hello all,
Just a casual question from a curious newbie. How are you using the library covers color data? Do you use it to find your books? Does it suggest something about how color influences what you buy? Does it relate to personality or genre or something else? Like I said, I'm curious.

I don't.

>2 MarthaJeanne:

Nor I. Some things are there for fun. If you don't have fun with them, don't bother.

Of course, if you do have fun, then have fun!

It's something fun to look at, but not real useful.
I can see people who shelve books by color using it.
But I don't have a use for it.

>4 gilroy: I can see people who shelve books by color using it.

But it's not the colour of their own books, is it? So pretty useless, I'd say.

>5 anglemark: I try to roll my own based on having scanned most of my covers. So I can do stuff like this:

cat /tmp/lt.rdb | perl /tmp/row any mat '/Gulik/' and Cover_Color mat '/Brown/' | perl /tmp/column Book_Id | perl /tmp/headchg --delete | xargs | sed -e 's/ / OR /g'

22378093 OR 22389961 OR 22393168 OR 22393288 OR 22395448 OR 22395943

I.e. produce something I can put into the search box in LT and get all the books by Robert van Gulik with a brownish cover. (Actually I have three nuances of brown in those covers: Brown::Tan, Brown::Brown, Brown::BurlyWood.)

but I seldom use it. It was inspired by LT using the cover colors, so that was not completely useless :-)

BTW it is rather hard to automatically go from a picture of a cover to a color name. Maybe it is better to decide which colors to use and just use tags like cover-red if you think of a cover as red?

I also have books with the spine a totally different colour than the front cover, so even if you know the right colour, it might not help find the book.

I never knew there was such a thing.

>7 MarthaJeanne: I also have books with the spine a totally different colour than the front cover, so even if you know the right colour, it might not help find the book.

Or, as is the case for a lot of us with old books, the spine and the front cover have faded differently, so even if they were the same colors once, they're different color now! Which just makes the problem worse.

(Edit: Sorry, this should have been attributed to >7 MarthaJeanne: not >8 lilithcat:. Apologies to both. Stupid brain-to-fingers connection!)

I get a lot of petty satisfaction from being able to prove too many covers (IMO) are largely grayscale. Spines are even worse, but as MarthaJeanne said a lot of covers and spines are different colors.

i haven't paid attention to cover data until now but it's cool to look at. especially the CoverGuess tags to see what it can and can't pick up on. If there's a way to add your own tags to the isbn that would be helpful to do some manual sorting

>8 lilithcat: I have never heard of this either. I wonder where one finds it.

>12 krazy4katz:

https://www.librarything.com/stats/krazy4katz/covers

Purple colors:
https://www.librarything.com/catalog/krazy4katz?colorterm=184&collection=-1

etc
You get to it via Home / Charts & Graphs / Book Covers

I think it's to help tinycat, for patrons who come in and ask for a book " I can't remember much about it, but it was red". It's apparently a real thing in libraries/bookshops.

>14 reading_fox: Definitely a real thing. Though, not so much bookshops, definitely libraries though. I've gotten a ton of them in my 20+ years, and, years ago I was able to answer one of them off the top of my head and thec patron was astounded (and happy to get the book). It was a shiny silver cover and a new book.

So my guess is that aside from being fun for some, it's also an inside librarian joke 🙂

>15 DanieXJ: Yeah, some of the popular titles you learnt quickly. In fact, many books I could much more easily identify by a patron's description of the cover than a synopsis of the plot (because I hadn't read it).

>15 DanieXJ: Thanks all. I hadn't thought about the fact the librarians would get questions using book colors.

We need a "book by vague description" feature.

>18 MrAndrew: tag mashes go a long way (but probably not for cover colors).

>18 MrAndrew:

Isn't that the basic aspiration of AI Search (Talpa)? I just tried "police in a parallel universe" and it got me a list including Flow My Tears the Policeman Said, which was the book I had in mind.

>4 gilroy: I do shelve books by color (sort of)* and I don't use it because it doesn't really help with that. Not only is it incomplete and inaccurate, it's not very good at telling me what color I'd've shelved it under - it doesn't really pick out the "main" color very well, or at least it uses different criteria than me. (I.e. a red cover with a mostly-purple picture on the front and black lettering is going to come up as equally red, purple, and black, which doesn't help with telling me it's shelved as red. Along with, of course, the ones with a different color spine than cover.)

*I sort mostly by topic and/or author, but each individual shelf is in rainbow order, because as long as I know which shelf it's on it's still easy to find, and if most of my walls are going to be books they might as well look nice.