Adazing.com is a self-publishing author’s friend
They say they are raising prices soon.
I do not get amazed easily. Definitely, not by software. The last time I was amazed by a software was when a multi-site submission software went through captcha images like it was child’s play.
Yesterday, I got an ISBN for my book Reptilian News Cartoons and I was trying to generate barcode images using it. Somehow, I landed on adazing.com and their site offered to generate 3d mockup images of books. I can do this manually with GIMP but they were doing it on stock photos of outdoor and indoor settings.
I uploaded the back cover of the book and they created a ton of mockups. Three mockups were freely downloadable. The rest of it was thumbnail images. The thumbnails were not downloadable.
Now, I like a challenge as anybody else in a 100-mile radius and I immediately did ‘Inspect element’ on the page’s HTML. Apparently, they did not generate any of the mockup images server-side. No, Sir. They have stock images with certain regions transparent or semi-transparent (for lighting/shade effect). They, then use HTML5 Javascript to place the uploaded cover image behind in those transparent areas. This happens on client-side – in your browser. Non-transparent areas of the stock image will block part of the cover image, completing the photo-realistic effect.
Who are these people and how did they get my book?
I had done the same thing to Hillary Clinton’s photo on the front cover of the B/W version of Reptilian News Cartoons. The text ‘Pay For Play’ was placed so surreptitiously that most people would think it was real. However, I did not know the same effect could be implemented in so many other ways.
Even the video that they created with my book cover was faked. They have a video on Vimeo that uses a no-name book with nothing on the cover. Then, they use Javascript to render the image over the video. Everything looks A-OK.
Kudos to Adazing for making it a seamless experience. The site provides several other services such as in-store book publicity material and author media kits. Their services are for authors who cannot do GIMP or Photoshop and do not want to deal with graphic artists.
Moral Volcano Blog ▄︻┻┳═一 