How to get a better cover pic for your AvaxHome ebook posts

When you post a book at AvaxHome, ppl will like to see at the top of your post a good quality cover image, large enough, clear enough and matching your edition. Many will want to save it too since a cover pic saved with the book can tell you much more quickly if you already happen to have that edition of the book, without having to open the book to find out.

If the .chm or .pdf text does not include the book's cover, as often happens, you should include the cover pic in your RAR file.

Unfortunately cover pics are also copyright and Amazon now go to some length to stop you from copying their cover pics. The usual way is to paste a big "Search Inside (tm)" crappy arrow on top of the cover, like the example above. Anyone who sees this pic knows its been taken from Amazon.

So where can book posters find nice clean cover pics to use? Here are some solutions in increasing order of difficulty:

1) Google the ISBN number plus "amazon" and check out a few Amazon pages (amazon.com, amazon.co.uk, etc). With some luck, especially for older books, you will find a large original pic without the arrow if the page has a "see larger image" link.

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2) Returning to your Google page, click the "Images" link above the search field and make Google look for an image about 300 x 400 px. You may find one on the publisher's website (e.g., Wiley). Here is the best image I could find of the same book using this search method, only 127 x 160 px but it does the job.



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3) Return to your Amazon page with the "Search Inside" invite and click the link "Search inside this book". You will probably see a huge cover pic, bigger than your screen. Save *this web page* (not the image itself) to your HD, then look inside the saved "_files" folder for the largest .jpg image with a long coded name, about 70 Kb. It will be the cover pic. Rename it to something sensible plz, like "cover.jpg" and upload that for your post. Pixhost.eu will reduce it to a thumbnail the correct size for AH, and ppl who want to download the image can r-click the thumbnail in the AH post and follow the link to the original pixhost.eu page, where they can save the enlarged image and maybe reduce it later at their leisure. Here's the "inside" image, 600 x 756, uploaded at that size to pixhost.eu, but automatically scaled down by AH for posting (you might like to reduce its size yourself before uploading, to ease the load on pixhost's server):



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4) Naturally, if the book file contains a cover pic, you could copy this using a screen capture program like SnagIt.

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5) Try cropping the whitespace from Amazon's pic using fine's Amazon Picture Cropper:
http://avaxhome.ws/music/AmazonPictureCropper.html
Personally I havent needed to use this app though it sounds useful.

Hope this info helps and is only for purposes of evaluation. It may also be useful if you are posting music. If you like the book, plz buy it and support the author and publisher.