I’ll second that!
Cory Doctorow suggests in the BoingBoing blog that publishers should adopt the convention of creating a directory on their web sites in which they would make available good quality images of the covers of all their books. Oh, that would make my life so much easier – and I’ll add the request that they do it, please, as soon as the covers are finalised, so that those of us who are trying to publicise the books can get ready before publication!
The plan, as propounded at BoingBoing, is that bloggers could be encouraged to hotlink to the covers (ie, set their page to refer to the image on the publisher’s site, rather than transfering images onto their own server). I don’t like hotlinking: it’s a way of using someone else’s bandwidth, which is dishonest, and it can create problems for the linker, if the image to which they have linked is removed or switched. But Doctorow suggests that this last point could be a benefit, an incentive for publishers to go along with the scheme: when you change the cover design of a book, you simply substitute the new image for the old one, and all over the internet, bloggers are suddenly displaying the latest edition!