On Thu, Aug 7, 2008 at 12:09 PM, Tim Spalding <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> After releasing all our series, award prizes and such, we've now
> released all our covers. See the blog:
>
> http://www.librarything.com/blog/2008/08/million-free-covers-from-librarything.php
>
> I really hope this—or more probably what comes of this—ends the
> selling of covers to libraries. Data companies are great. People want
> data more and more every year. There are a million ways of making
> money off selling to this need. (We're no Bowker, but we too make some
> money off selling data.) But covers need to drop out the bottom and
> become free.

While this looks like a really cute service, if you *really* want to
kill the whole 'selling covers to libraries' thing, why not just tar
'em up and drop 'em into a torrent? Put a README file in there that
says "Hi, we're LibraryThing and we gave y'all these covers. If you
want to buy our other data services, that'd be neat?" and be done with
it. As an added bonus, your scaling concerns would go away.

Or, at least drop the "no sharing or competing with us" restrictions.
I highly(!) doubt that someone's gonna take these covers and use them
to destroy you.

Cheers,
-Nate