If we take the book on amazon's web site it has a cover image size of 300 x 300 pixels the same as most (all?) amazon cover images.

However, when I add a title to the book list and BookLibrary fetches the image it is 128 (or 102) x 160 pixels

For the index view this is probably ok apart from slowing page load time as it it downsampled to say 40px × 50px), but for the detailed view the image is upsampled and is very fuzzy and the proportions are wrong (I set the book cover size to 300x300 expecting it to echo the Amazon page image dimensions and proportions so this accounts for the proportions changing but even at 2x (i.e 256 x 320 px) the cover loses much detail in comparison to the amazon orignal. Also some books seem to be of differing pixel width in the BookLibary fetched images but on the amazon site they are always 300 x 300 with additional whitespace.

Looking at the urls of the images I can see a difference in the file extension.

Is there a means of forcing the fetching of the amazon cover images with extension
*._SL500_AA300_.jpg rather than *._SL160_.jpg ?

Hi,

When we fetch info from amazon - we see very much different infor for every items. There always exist some image sizes for covers.

We checked these fields and images format and now in BookLibrary use only what think - most use full for all customers.

If you think all must look other - you can self rebuild that component or ask that from us(BookLibrary open source component).

Order for customization we take through Contact Form.

Thanks,
OrdaSoft team

Is there a recommended value for the book cover size parameter such that the images retain their proportions?

Recommended - from us - that as we set

Amazon API return images set for every book.

You can self check images size what we take from Amazon and try set for self correct proportions

Thanks,
OrdaSoft team

So what is the default book cover pixel size set on installation? I didn't note it down and installing again would presumably take the existing settings from the database.

160x124

Thanks,
OrdaSoft team