I was initially optimistic of finding an automated way of harvesting book cover images from Amazon, but after a few attempts at using website copying software (httrack, SiteSucker), difficulty with the website format (the covers aren't even directly downloadable files..?) and an approaching deadline, I resorted to using screenshots. For future knowledge, I would still be very interested in learning an automated way of doing this.
Finding a good variety of ratings for books has also been difficult. Books can only be sorted from highest-rated to lowest-rated, and I was not able to access search results past 100 pages.
Anyway, I at least have a range of ratings from 3-5 stars. I've been saving them in PNG format to avoid loss of image quality. I use XnView, a free image-editing software that lets me crop and re-size many images at a time (available at http://www.xnview.com/en/index.html). So far I have 66 SciFi/Fantasy, 98 Romance, and 85 History, with more being added every day. For next week, I'll need to finish image collection and have a solid idea of what features I am going to extract and how. Some of my favorite book covers so far:
If you're curious, here's a link to the full project proposal.
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