I know, I know . . . selling books is sooo 10 years ago.

But the occasion may arise where you want to go old school and use amazon Images in your promotions. Let’s say you want to use Amazon Images in your website to promote Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. You search amazon for “wealth of nations” and see these results:

You right click on 1. Image and click view image (in firefox). and are taken to this url:

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/517E1E0T4DL._SL160_PIsitb-sticker-arrow-dp,TopRight,12,-18_SH30_OU01_AA115_.jpg

which looks like this:

Now I don’t know about you, but that image is not all that sexy to me: it’s too small, and has that annoying “Look Inside!” at the top. You’ve probably also seen it with the kindle edition wrapper.

Here’s the trick. All of amazon’s images appear to be created on the fly from a single base image for the product. In the case above, the “original” is the image name up to the first dot followed by a .jpg.

So in the above example, that would be:

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/517E1E0T4DL.jpg

which as you can see, resolves as

Now you have access to the high quality original without the look inside sticker or all the extra white space.

The properties after the first dot in the image tell Amazon how to process the image on the fly. These calculations are not done in the crude way of having html resize a bigger image. They are done on the backend.

To resize the above image, after the first dot add _SL followed by the number of pixels you want in the height of the image. So, to make the above bookcover a height of, say, 240 pixels the expression would be written:

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/517E1E0T4DL._SL240.jpg

It’s not rocket science; but it’s a neat little trick that uses amazon’s incredible infrastructure to support your sites. The ability to integrate this into your larger computer generated spam thoughtfully constructed mashups should be self evident.

Enjoy!