I will be doing a website for a book store and am wondering how to make the pictures of the books. Do we scan them in or take pictures, or is there a site online that has pictures of various books? Probably a very simple answer, but this will be my first ecommerce site. Thank you for any help. Sarah

Hi Sarah,
These type of questions may be answered in the Break Room, but while we're here my opinion is what ever you think would look best. you could google book images or look up other websites which have book images to get an idea. Digital camera and a book case could look nice as well. The main thing is what your comfortable with.

thank you for your reply. The reason I posted here is that I will be using the shopping cart program. of course and i have seen several book shops posted that have used the shopping cart program. Just thought maybe someone from these shops could let me know how they produced the pictures of the books. Otherwise, I will scan the books or take pictures, or whatever. At any rate, coffeecup software is great and creating websites is a wonderful learning experience.

I can help you Sarah. Look at the attached.

Hi-res, transparency if needed. You provide the spine and cover graphic and I'll create them for $1 each.

That is so cool David. I will have to ask the owner of the book store what he would like to do, but that would look so very nice on a website. Thanks.

I don't mean to sound ignorant here but $1 each picture? Man, I hope they don't have a couple of thousand books to get pictures of! Even a couple of hundred at that price would make me do my own. I have looked at the option of someone producing my pictures for me in the past and their quote was no where near $1 a piece.
Another option might be a high school or college photography club. I have worked with school clubs in the past and their advisor is usually excited to have an outside project for their students to work on. And the best part is it's free.

Can't you just go to Amazon and snarf a copy of the book image from there?

Wow, all good ideas. Thanks so much everyone. the book store deals in old and 1st edition books. Probably Amazon would have some of them. the owner wants to start out with about 50 books, but will get to 1,000 or more by the time we're done, but don't know if he wants pictures of all of them. I really like David's picture, so maybe a few of them and a few from Amazon and a few from the college kids. (college kids used to look older than they do now, funny) then, maybe I could scan some and take pictures of some with my little camera. Thank you so much for replying. I feel totally better about the whole thing now.

Hi Craig,

While I only mentioned hi-res in my post, I didn't mention the dimensions. I quoted a price for images 2000x2000. The rendering time for something that large with ray tracing, 3D and a front cover with spine is approximately 15 minutes... each. So, you can figure I could get four done in an hour. That's $4 an hour for my time. More than reasonable if you ask me.

Sarah,

I could do images that are 320x240 pixels. Those take about :30 to render. I'll crank out sixty for a $12 flat rate. That's .20 a piece. I'm not looking to get rich here.

That sounds great David. I'm meeting with the book store owner today and will talk with him about the pictures. think it's a very nice idea. will let you know as soon as he lets me know what he wants to do. Maybe we should discuss this through email and not on coffeecup's time. Thanks.