For better of for worse, book covers are a dying art. As more and more authors are publishing solely online for those with access to eReaders to read, book covers are becoming superfluous. And I'm not convinced that that's entirely a bad thing. True, an entire section of people with a specialized job will be out of work and that's never a good thing in today's economy, but the idea of the book cover is something I've never quite been fond of for a number of reasons. The biggest reason of all is that the author often has little to no say on what the cover looks like, which accounts for the thousands of young adult novels with pretty white girls on the cover who play no apparent part in the actual plot. Book covers are, more often than not, a way to sell the book. The Newbery-worth novel with the plain brown book cover won't sell as many copies as the glorified pornography book with a minimalistic rose on the front with a sexy satin ribbon tied around its stem.
Still, there is something to be said about the art of book cover making that makes it worth crying over, and that is reintroducing old classics to a new, easily distracted audience. The covers for Shakespeare's Hamlet or Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, when donning an updated book cover might attract the attention of a young adult who is so easily taken in by aesthetics.
Book covers aren't only for young adult and children's novels, of course. The adult romance novel section would contain naught but bad writing and worse plots without Fabio strutting with some bodacious damsel on the cover.
Still, the completely electronic book world is a while off and we're stuck with book covers, so I'd like to just appreciate the ones that make even a little bit of sense for now.
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