Following the project to make a poster from the cover of every movie I’ve watched over the last seven years, I wanted to do the same for the covers of my books. Obviously, I couldn’t fit the cover of every book I’ve ever read on a poster: short of making the poster truly gigantic, the individual covers would no longer be legible, as there are roughly 50% more books than movies in my collection. In addition, a high percentage of the books stored in my copy of Delicious Library continue to lack cover art, due to their rarity.
I settled on using 850 or so covers, using a variation of this technique. Delicious Library does not appear to store book cover art as separate files – I suspect that they are retained as BLOBS in its database – so the first technical hurdle was to extract them. While DL has a bunch of publishing options, they do not include “images only“. However, “publish as web pages“ worked: using one of the templates supplied by the application exports the cover images as PNGs, along with a bunch of supporting HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
Unfortunately it also exports the “blank” images of books without covers, leaving a bunch of all-black images mixed in with the rest. But since PNG is a lossless format, all the “blank” images were 20 or 24KB in size, making it easy to sort the contents of the exported images folder by size and eliminate those images that fell in that range.