Abusing Amazon Images

A gentleman named Nat Gertler has gone to astounding lengths to figure out the variables in the Amazon image URLs. And since I love a little URL hacking, I wanted to point you toward his explanations and examples at http://aaugh.com/imageabuse.html .

There are several things you can do with an image (usually a cover or a product image) in Amazon's database, including tilting it, adding drop shadows, and adding percentage blips -- actually many percentage blips at the same time. Some of the examples are goofy but some of them are almost artistic.

Mr. Gertler notes that messing around with Amazon's images like this does take up their bandwidth, so it's best that you view this as both proof-of-concept and educational, and don't decorate your sites with tilted, drop-shadowed book covers with percentage stickers all over them.

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