Add book cover images to the search result page

[jbao]

Make it easy to navigate through the search results.

According to this notebook, there's an image_url field in the raw data, which we can probably add into the response of the search API call and then render in the frontend?

[veekaybee]

We can! How might you see designing this, i.e. would it be a separate column? A separate UI element? What currently makes navigation hard that adding images would solve? How might you deal with results that don't have images? There's a lot of considerations here, including how accessing those images would work (i.e. pulling them directly from the image url might work but we don't want to introduce unnecessary load and dependencies on Goodreads, downloading all the images mean we're now running a CDN. Would love to hear more about what you're thinking.

[jbao]

All good points. I imagined the cover images to be a separate column on the search result page (possibly with a hyperlink to the Goodreads book page). I feel often times visual cues can give hints on the book genre or maybe even storyline, which can help the user decide which search results are more relevant. (Now that we're talking, I actually think another column of the publication year might also be nice to have 😀 )

In terms of the implementation, I agree that downloading the images seems to add a lot of overhead. Can we retrieve the image url from the search API and render the link (e.g. https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1304100136m/7327624.jpg) on the result page? This does add dependency on Goodreads, but I think it's safe as long as Goodreads is still live?