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22 February 2006

Judging books, CDs and DVDs by their covers

Chris Riley’s brain was working overtime a few weeks ago. You could almost hear those rusty cogs turning! He was thinking about how he could use Amazon Web Services to power a cool new website. After throwing a few ideas around the office, he someone (probably the other Chris) finally came up with the concept for Judge A Book By Its Cover.co.uk.

The idea’s a simple one: view the covers of books, CDs or DVDs and rate them from one to five stars based purely on how they look. Once you’ve submitted your rating, compare what you and others thought about the cover to the Amazon rating to see if it really is that unreasonable to judge a book by its cover. If you want to see for yourself whether you judged correctly, you can easily click-through to Amazon to buy the book, CD or DVD and make your own mind up.

I prefer the Head to Head! version of the game. It’s much easier to compare two covers and choose which you think is best than it is to rate a cover from one to five. (Sometimes, you’ll be faced with two covers that are so similar that you can’t decide which one gets your vote – but don’t worry, you can always call a draw if that happens!)

There’s more to read in the About & FAQs section of the site and you can keep up to date with the latest news on the site’s blog.

Get judging!

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Judging books, CDs and DVDs by their covers posted by at 21:20 4 comments Add your comments

4 Comments

Wait, wasn't it me that came up with the idea? Or am I imaganing that (me imagining things that never happened is perfectly normal behaviour for me, so I have to ask).
by Blogger Chris  
Probably. If I'm honest, I can't really remember. Chris is a bit cagey about who came up with the idea on the site - i.e. "following a random conversation at work regarding this, we came up with this website!" so perhaps it was. I shall update the post accordingly!
by Blogger Tony Ruscoe  
I've never claimed the idea to be mine, I'm simply the one who got on and did it! In all honesty I do think it was Chris who had the Judge A Book By Its Cover brainwave. But as he said at the time, he couldn't be bothered to do it!
by Blogger Chris  
Yeah I can never be bothered with following through with ideas. I came up with a great idea for bringing fishmongery into to the 21st century the other, but will probably not get around to implimenting it.
by Blogger Chris