The New York Public Library (NYPL) is working on an ebook borrowing app. Some of the ebooks will come from public domain sites like Project Gutenberg. The problem with many of the public domain ebooks is that they lack (decent) covers. This led NYPL’s Mauricio Giraldo Arteaga to make programs that automatically create ebook covers.
Mauricio’s first program is based on the generative art project 10 PRINT. It draws graphics and creates color schemes based on the letters in a book’s title. The graphics are mostly based on the PETSCII character set, while Mauricio came up with his own process for selecting the colors. You can see some of the results in the image above.
The image below is from his second ebook cover generator. It’s for ebooks that have illustrations embedded as image files. Mauricio made a program that extracts the illustrations and turns them into book covers. Both programs have adjustable parameters, such as brightness and saturation. The second program also has an option for picking only the pictures with a face or faces in it.
You can download both programs on Mauricio’s GitHub page. Mauricio made them in Processing, but he also made an iOS/Objective-C version of the abstract cover generator.
[via NYPL]
