Development of the Book Cover Image Generation API “opencover”

Development and Challenges Toward the Realization of “Virtual Bookshelf”

Abstract

This paper presents “opencover,” a book cover image generation API developed for our “Virtual Bookshelf” concept. The system aims to reproduce the visual experience of physical bookshelves in digital environments.

We detail the challenges of bibliographic data accessibility and design representation, and present our solution using programmatically generated spine images with simplified style templates.

Our implementation uses a serverless architecture and proposes a crowdsourcing approach to extend coverage, offering new possibilities for digital book collection visualization.