Study of Interface Design for Browsing Book Sets: Generating Spine Image for development of “Virtual Bookshelf”

The presenter is developing a web service, "Virtual Bookshelf," for sharing book lists online. A book list is a group of books curated on an arbitrary subject, such as personal collections of books, book reviews, or book guides. The ways of presenting book lists vary depending on the location. In real space, books are arranged on shelves or tables. In print, the bibliographic information for each book is itemized and sometimes accompanied by an image of the book cover. In virtual space, the traditional method of arranging books with bullet points and the image of the book cover is still followed. On the other hand, there are also examples of bookcases that imitate real bookshelves and present the spines side by side, as well as experimental projects that arrange books in three-dimensional space or geographically. In response to these examples, we considered adopting an interface design for the "virtual bookshelf" that presents a list of books with their spines lined up, and developed a program to generate spine images from bibliographic information. The target books were limited to paperbacks (shinsho). This presentation reports on the background and prospects of this development.