Landscape covers

[Fred Slota]

Did a rebuild last night.

 

Advanced find for       ((I.[PictureWidth]*10)/I.[PictureHeight] > 14) AND ((I.[PictureWidth]*10)/I.[PictureHeight] < 17)

which I believe winnowed out wraparound and gatefold cover scans.

 

There are 1,822 cover scans that look like they have been entered in landscape orientation.  I highly doubt that the majority of those were books that read entirely in landscape.

 

I think the cat is out of the bag...

[Gregory Hecht]

1 hour ago, Fred Slota said:

Did a rebuild last night.

 

Advanced find for       ((I.[PictureWidth]*10)/I.[PictureHeight] > 14) AND ((I.[PictureWidth]*10)/I.[PictureHeight] < 17)

which I believe winnowed out wraparound and gatefold cover scans.

 

There are 1,822 cover scans that look like they have been entered in landscape orientation.  I highly doubt that the majority of those were books that read entirely in landscape.

 

I think the cat is out of the bag...

Many of them could be legit landscape publications. A lot of comic strip reprints over the last several years have been in landscape format books.  The Library of American Comics publications (most of which have come out via IDW) use that format very often, for example. 

[Fred Slota]

I did some additional searches, narrowing by publisher or looking at higher ratios, but the numbers don't really matter...  What dose or doesn't currently exist, which scans follow the rules and which ones break the rules.  The question isn't what the rules/guidelines are for portrait vs. landscape cover scans, but why those are the rules/guidelines.

 

The best reason I can come up with was that early on there was a desire to optimize the resolution of the thumbnail scans.  But, if so, is that still a valid reason?  Screens are larger now.  I think the software currently uses a larger default/initial thumbnail size than before.  And we currently accept landscape scans for comic strip books, wide scans for wraparound and gatefold covers.

 

Why don't we accept landscape scans for special covers on internally standard books?

[Mark J. Castaneda]

we try to take landscape covers as we see them come in BUT its tough... With the huge amount of covers we get daily whether through our weekly book shipments and/or user submissions, its hard to spot them all when the majority are in portrait orientation. If you see them as you come across them, landscape them and send them in via user corrections.

[Fred Slota]

I understand the difficulties on consistency. 

I'm unclear on what this last statement is saying, though...  Are landscape-oriented scans for internally portrait oriented books acceptable?  And if so, is there a way to force a user correction submission for rotation, as that will generally be a same-size picture and not automatically submitted?

[Mark J. Castaneda]

there's no way to force landscape rotation if it comes through at first. Each cover that comes in is visually checked by our editorial team. We have to spot it before hand and manually adjusted before adding it in. The problem is the volume of covers we get daily, they're hard to spot sometimes.

[Fred Slota]

I don't begrudge the overlooked cases, and sorry if it sounds like I'm beating a horse that you think is already dead.  To be clear, it is acceptable for landscape-oriented covers to have landscape-oriented cover scans, regardless of the orientation of the internal printed material, yes?

[Mark J. Castaneda]

yes

 

[Fred Slota]

Thank you.