Note made wide via a Minimal Theme helper class. Banner added by Pretty Properties. The latter also shows the cover image right next to properties, mimicking layouts on sites like Goodreads and IMDb:
I used Local images plus to automatically download cover images when I pasted them in note body. I then copy-and-pasted them it into the cover property. After that, a custom Linter rule formatted them by stripping out the preceding ! and adding an inconspicuous ^ caption.
I scraped the internet for metadata and cover images by hand. It was a rather lengthy process—took me a few days to do this for 100+ titles.
What I came to realize from scraping book metadata by hand is that there isn’t a definitive source of truth. Google Books often shows incorrect year when the work was first published, for example.
I prefer to cross-reference info between Goodreads, Wikipedia, Google Books and Amazon, and to pick out a cover that’s most pleasant to the eye.
It takes a few minutes but then I’m sure that the info is accurate.
It may be tiresome to do add items by hand when first building your library but it becomes trivial once it’s been built and you then only add one or a few individual works at a time.
You might want to check LibraryThing. With millions of user-uploaded covers, most books have a cover for pretty much any edition. There’s also a detailed Common Knowledge section with data ranging from original publication date, original title, to characters, first and last words, related movies/TV shows, etc.
Looking forward to Bases and making my own shelves.
