quick coffeescript example how to pull bookjacket covers from Google Books in Blacklight. In the views, I added a span with .bookcover and an id of the isbn. AJAX grabs all the .bookcover id's, queries google, which returns JSONP that have all the images url. eh. you don't have to use google...you could just make your own controller that returns…

gistfile1.txt

insertBookCoverImage = (data) -> 
	for id, values of data	
		imgId = values.bib_key.toLowerCase().replace(":", "_")
		$("##{imgId}").attr("src", values.thumbnail_url)
		
addBookCovers = (ids) ->
	url = "http://books.google.com/books?bibkeys=#{ids}&jscmd=viewapi&callback=?"
	$.getJSON url, {}, insertBookCoverImage

$ -> 
	addBookCovers(( "ISBN:#{bookcover.id}," for bookcover in $('.bookcover[id]')).join(","))