A friend sent me a link to fantastic essay by Craig Mod called Hack the Cover which is not quite a manifesto about ebook cover design. It is Craig thinking seriously about how book covers developed in the first place (to protect the innards, quite simply) and relating that functionality to what we have come to associate as merely a design issue: how a book “looks”.
What struck me particularly was his observation which I will paraphrase as “ebook covers are just icons”. That is, they don’t really serve the purpose of informing us about the book itself; that information is on the web page are looking at about the book. Amazon (Kindle) is Craig’s example but it is indicative of nearly every ebook seller I’ve seen online: lots of text about the book surround a very small picture of the cover.
In digital books, we have separated the data from the cover, so the question becomes what purpose does the cover serve, then? What is the text of the cover telling us?
I suppose it is more about tone, quality, and expectations than raw information. A cheesy romance genre book cover has standard elements and certain look that clearly identifies it. The title, the author, and the blurb are totally secondary to the image of the heaving bosom or manly bare chest. We get it: we know what the book is about. All the words around it on the page are simply refinements of what the cover has told us.
Which is the purpose of an icon, in the Internet era. In ever ysocial network, you pick an icon to represent you to other people. I make my own, as do many people, from photos of myself. Companies use their logo in their icons. Writers occasionally use a temporary icon featuring a book cover as a promotional tool. These “tiny texts” of information tell us immediately a lot about what we can expect by interacting with that person or company.
Book covers, then, have evolved from utilitarian solution to indication of importance to data provider to, now in the form of ebooks, icons.
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