I've had some minor frustrations in the past trying to decorate my posts with book cover photos from Amazon. Either I couldn't seem to find a good size, or it had annoying white borders on both sides that took up too much real estate. I was quite pleased when the lastest LibraryThing blog post pointed to Abusing Amazon Images. Finally, the secret code of Amazon images has been cracked, or at least most of it has. Although one can use this secret knowledge to get a nice plain book cover image for your blog, you can also do weird and wonderful things with Amazon thumbnails. Like this:
Heh. Looks like there has been some tectonic uplift there.
Apparently the server for Amazon images has changed since the tutorial was last updated. They are now served from ecx.images-amazon.com, and the older images.amazon.com works just fine too.
If you don't want to read the whole tutorial, below are some basic layouts. Just replace the 10-digit ISBN/ASIN for your item. (N.B. These codes are for the US and Canada. Codes for other countries are in the tutorial.)
http://images.amazon.com/images/P/1550418602.jpg (default)
http://images.amazon.com/images/P/1550418602.01._SCTHUMBZZZ_.jpg
http://images.amazon.com/images/P/1550418602.01._PC_SCTHUMBZZZ_.jpg
http://images.amazon.com/images/P/1550418602.01._SCTZZZZZZZ_.jpg
http://images.amazon.com/images/P/1550418602.01._PC_SCTZZZZZZZ_.jpg
http://images.amazon.com/images/P/1550418602.01._SCMZZZZZZZ_.jpg
http://images.amazon.com/images/P/1550418602.01._PC_SCMZZZZZZZ_.jpg
http://images.amazon.com/images/P/1550418602.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg
http://images.amazon.com/images/P/1550418602.01._PC_SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg
