Judging Books by their Covers
This past weekend, My Girlfriend and I went over to our local Indigo (book store) to browse around, stretch our legs, and pick-up some books to read. She is an avid reader (which I admire) and was able to find two new books to enjoy quite quickly. I found a hardcover sci-fi book (Iain M. Banks’ latest ‘Culture’ novel, Matter) on the discount shelf for under $10. I’ve read this author before, many years ago now, but I don’t remember which book it was… Inversions perhaps? Looking at the author’s website doesn’t help either; none of the covers I see there are ones I recognize. Sound familiar?
You see, this is what I don’t understand about the book industry right now: why do they feel the need to republish books, year after year, with new covers? It’s the same book… the same content… the same format… but new cover art! No musical artist (that I’m aware of) re-issues the same album with new cover art on such a regular basis; for an anniversary re-issue with new tracks, or some sort of money-grubbin’ special edition with a few b-sides and demo versions, sure, maybe… but then there is (technically) new content. And no, I don’t consider a new forward by some special guest or a few pages about this second publishing to be enough to warrant a new look to the whole work.
Now, that said, technical manuals or books I will give a certain amount of leeway. An excellent example of this is the wonderful and highly recommended Designing with Web Standards guide by web guru Jeffrey Zeldman. The latest, 3rd edition of this book comes with a blue cover. The 2nd edition was, if I’m not mistaken, a green cover. The original, 1st edition (which I own), came in an iconic orange cover. Easy to see the difference between editions, but the cover imagery is always the same. And here, while there might not be a great deal of difference from one edition to the next, these minor changes can be substantial in terms of the context (web development: the phasing out of some code, the introduction of new code, etc.). But, even in this example, despite the changes to the content, the cover art/design stays consistent… building a brand and a look that you can associate with.
Do books (fiction, non-fiction, etc., as opposed to technical books) change their art in an attempt to stir sales? The second book I picked up this past weekend was the iconic Beat Generation prose, On the Road by Jack Kerouac. It was the latest Penguin Modern Classics cover that grabbed me. The whole shelf was filled with these gorgeous covers of, well, modern classics. And, don’t get me wrong, Penguin continues to publish some of the most beautiful book sleeves out there, year after year… but this book, the story in this book, the words in this book, have not changed in over fifty years! In fact, I could have saved $3.50 and bought another copy of the same book with a different cover on it from the same store! But, I didn’t (because of an in-store promotion, the great deal I was getting on my other book and because I’m still using a gift card I got at Christmas and I always allow myself to splurge a little when using gift cards). So, did I get caught up in the cover? Is this why book publishers do this? Am I the perfect example of why they change the cover art year after year?
As I implied at the start of this post, I’m not the reader I once was. While On the Road is considered a classic by many, I’m not someone who has gone back and read all of the ‘great American novels’ of the past hundred years. Do people get upset by the new art given to novels? I know I’d be upset to pick-up a copy of an album like Dark Side of the Moon and find something, anything other than the iconic prism looking back at me. Do books have this same connection to their sleeves? Or are they just advertisements for the words inside?
The changing covers drive me crazy because, as a completist, I always worry that I’ll start reading a series this year and, by the time I finish it, I’ll have three different styles of cover art making up the collection. I don’t think this has ever stopped me from buying a book, but some part of me always considers it.
So, what do you think? Do you buy books because of their covers? Do the ever-changing sleeves on books make you wonder? Does it drive you crazy like it does me? Are there any books out there with covers so connected to the words inside that they are iconic (a’la the DSotM example above)?