How has the Digital Age Effected the Evolution of the Book Cover?
Muerto!
The covers are dead!
Dead!
Dead like the record jacket!
Dead like the laser disc sleeve!
Dead like the 8-track cartridge sticker!
Dead like the squishy Disney VHS container!
Dead like the cassette tape insert!
Dead like those damned CD jewel cases and their booklets!
Dead like DVD and Blu-ray box art!
Put 'em all in a box, burn 'em, and sprinkle their ashes over your razed local bookstore. Call it a day. Hang up your exact-o knifes and weld shut your drawers of metal type. The writing's not on the wall but it was on one of those covers you just lit on fire — so we'll never know what it said.
---Craig Mod---
Phooey! did you make it? haha
Now---!
The question of inquiry:
How has the digital age influenced the evolution of the book cover?
- What is history of the book cover?
- What about the history of the aesthetics of the book cover?
- How about the Aesthetics today?
- What are the impacts of Amazon and the Kindle?
Book covers, more specifically---digital book covers, as we know them are dead. We still revere the book cover as an essential portion of the book, we hold them in the same respect that we hold a print book cover, but the digital book cover isn't an essential part of the book anymore. So why do we still hold the book cover as a pivotal marketing tool?
The Physical Evolution of the Book Cover:A History
In the 15th century:
Bookbinding came out of the dark ages as European culture began to flourish. It was typically bound with wood splints.
In the 16th Century:
“Birth to the modern book”
Books began to become smaller and were easier to bind. Pasteboards made from layers of glued together paper. But the term “board” stuck and is still used to describe the covers of a book. Gold tooling began to be more prominent and titles slowly made their way onto the spines of books.
In the 17-18th Century:
“I’m fancier Now”
This century is very similar to the previous century; however binding decoration becomes fancier, while the structure of the book becomes simpler.
In the 19th Century:
“Era of Industrialization of Book Binding”
Publishers began to take control of the whole book-making process, from editing to printing to binding. With an increase in sales, binders turned to mechanization to meet consumer’s demands. Cloth bindings were the norm at the end of the century.
This is the Century that Publishers began to recognize covers as a vital part of the “whole”. Cover designs started to reflect the content of the book.
In the 20th Century:
“Books for the Masses”
Since books could be produced by the thousands with the help of the Industrial revolution.
-Machine sewing became stronger
-adhesive binding took over sewing.
- In the 1920’s decorated cloth bindings gave way to the printed dust jacket.
-The paperback book we know today (not just limp binding)
-beginning the digital age
In the 21st Century
Physical books are still published in similar ways. Standardly a hardback bound book, or hardback with a dust sleeve will be published before their paperback counterparts.
Digital books begin being published accessible through e-reader.
Most book covers have been aesthetically classified by their genre. Today when you're browsing the bookstore (or the web, for that matter) you never get a romance novel mixed up with a mystery novel. That's the book-covers doing.
A lot of that has to do with the graphic design and "training" our society has been doing for the last thirty years. Keep in mind that not all covers "shout" these covers blend austerity, reverence for the text, and marketing.
The reason i chose all these images is because i thought that all these covers were eye catching, or played with space, lines, or text in interesting ways.
These covers of course don't represent all of the book covers being published today, but these covers are current pieces (2007- on) that use an auster-type cover. The simplicity of the most of the images i selected blends with the text to create an eye-catching design that will market and represent the content of the novel.
Take "Eight Weeks of Bruce" for example: there are mainly three colors playing with that image. The color red draws the eye over the white. The red, spilled wine, leads the eye along the title of the piece. The text on the cover is laid out in loose Z pattern. What i mean about that that "Readers will start in the top/left, move horizontally to the top/right and then diagonally to the bottom/right before finishing with another horizontal movement to the bottom/right. The z-pattern is sometimes called a reverse-s-pattern, which might indicate more of a curved path as opposed to the hard angled path. Otherwise they’re basically the same thing." (Steven Bradley)
This book cover doesn't do a traditional Z pattern, there isn't a bottom to the Z in the design, but the principle is the same. The author's name leads into the title and bright color, following across the bottom of the cover.
What i really enjoy about the piece are the conclusions and mood set by the cover through the use of this Z pattern [before the consumer reads the flap cover]. At the top right-hand side, the tipped over wine glass with the spilled content bringing highlight to the title of the novel. The title "Eight Weeks of Bruce" leads into the assumption that the spilled wine and the eight weeks of Bruce must be a boyfriend or story of a past relationship.
When the consumer reads the back cover they with discover that the book "is the second book by New York writer Maya Contreras, exploring her relationship with a full-time alcoholic".
Like I said earlier, you never get a romance novel mixed up with a mystery novel because society has trained us to read the book cover in certain ways. The marketing of this book cover is dead on. It's simple, but it blends text and smart-design to create a marketable piece.
If so much of what book cover design has evolved into is largely a brick-and-mortar marketing tool, then what place does a ‘cover’ hold in our digital book age? Especially after you purchase it? But, more tellingly, even before you purchase it?
The answer is:
Clicking on a title in your Kindle’s text-only reading list (Fig. 1) thrusts you straight onto the first page of the first chapter. (Fig. 2) Front matter — copyright, table of contents — and, yes, the cover are skipped over. In the Steve Jobs biography, you have to press the back button more than fifteen times (Fig. 3 — still not there) to get to the cover on a Kindle. (Mod)
The cover has been removed from the book process on a Kindle digital reading interface. After you purchase the book online, with the little icon cover page--the cover becomes irrelevant. Where as, if you had the physical book: the cover would be staring at you every time you set the book down (or the spine would face out of your bookcase).
As Professor Downs has pointed out to me there is a “ "Cover View" setting for looking at the device contents with, and will never use that stupid text-list ever again”.
....my response being....
Digital books begin being published accessible through e-reader.
How about those Aesthetics:
The book cover started as a physical necessity to protect the interior pages (the Innards). The cover remained simple or delicately designed/ tooled until the 19th century, when the cover began to reflect content. As the simple bound leather book covers transitioned into today’s hardback and paperback books, the covers evolved into a more aesthetic and marketable piece. When the book cover became a part of the marketing world, it took a large evolutionary step from the simple tooling, and indication of position in society to a powerful connection to the content of the book.
As you have seen from my short history of the book cover, the nineteenth century marks when publishers started to use the book cover as critical part of the book as a whole. Today many cover designers call the book cover the first chapter of the book. The transition from the cover being a tool to protect the innards of the book to a marketing tool indicates another type of evolution outside of form.
With the mass production of books the cover design gradually evolved, and the designers used various elements of design and typography to entice the readers to purchase a book.
The evolution started with the early elegant leather bindings:
Then you have Cloth:
John Davidson, New ballads (1897)
This was a uniform binding of black cloth with a minimalist art design of intertwining flowers and birds, with typography.
This was a uniform binding of black cloth with a minimalist art design of intertwining flowers and birds, with typography.
Stanley Jones, The actor and his art. (1899)
A bold typography and brilliant minimal color composition
A bold typography and brilliant minimal color composition
If you look at the last two book covers, then you can see that while these pieces were published just a few years apart, how they were composed is completely different, and strongly reflects how Publishers started using covers in new ways.
Despite how interesting the late 1800’s book covers, the more interesting transition occurs thirty or more years after Stanley Jones’ novel. The post-WWI Cultural Revolution changed the well-known simple topography. This movement was lead mostly by the impact of the Yellow Book.
The Times referred to the "repulsiveness and insolence" of the cover; The Westminster Gazette remarked about the "Portrait of Mrs. Patrick Campbell" it would take "a short act of Parliament to make this kind of thing illegal." (History of Graphic Design)
A world of symbolism and color entered into mainstream book publishing. Artist were sought after to design book covers. One of the well-known examples, perhaps, being Francis Cugat’s cover for the first edition of The Great Gatsby (1925).
Essentially, these artists, and the graphic designers used informed imagery to subtly convey plot/tone/character in ways that traditional illustrators couldn't. (Smithsonian)
What was most fascinating about the time that followed The Great Gatsby is the use of universal branding of a cover to make a profit. “The 1930’s saw a paperback revolution that made both classics and trade works available to the common consumer at inexpensive prices. Penguin, launched in 1935, was the era’s most successful publisher, thanks in part to its universal motif featuring genre-specific coloring and consistent type. With universal branding, the company stood out in a growing paperback sector that relied heavily on inconsistent, graphic-heavy covers”. (litreacter.com)
The time period that followed the paperbacks saw a lot of graphic heavy, over-literal illustrations that migrated from the genre of pulp and fiction to mainstream and literary work in the 50’s. The photo heavy motif stuck around through the 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s.
What About Today?
Most book covers have been aesthetically classified by their genre. Today when you're browsing the bookstore (or the web, for that matter) you never get a romance novel mixed up with a mystery novel. That's the book-covers doing.
A lot of that has to do with the graphic design and "training" our society has been doing for the last thirty years. Keep in mind that not all covers "shout" these covers blend austerity, reverence for the text, and marketing.
The reason i chose all these images is because i thought that all these covers were eye catching, or played with space, lines, or text in interesting ways.
These covers of course don't represent all of the book covers being published today, but these covers are current pieces (2007- on) that use an auster-type cover. The simplicity of the most of the images i selected blends with the text to create an eye-catching design that will market and represent the content of the novel.
Take "Eight Weeks of Bruce" for example: there are mainly three colors playing with that image. The color red draws the eye over the white. The red, spilled wine, leads the eye along the title of the piece. The text on the cover is laid out in loose Z pattern. What i mean about that that "Readers will start in the top/left, move horizontally to the top/right and then diagonally to the bottom/right before finishing with another horizontal movement to the bottom/right. The z-pattern is sometimes called a reverse-s-pattern, which might indicate more of a curved path as opposed to the hard angled path. Otherwise they’re basically the same thing." (Steven Bradley)This book cover doesn't do a traditional Z pattern, there isn't a bottom to the Z in the design, but the principle is the same. The author's name leads into the title and bright color, following across the bottom of the cover.
What i really enjoy about the piece are the conclusions and mood set by the cover through the use of this Z pattern [before the consumer reads the flap cover]. At the top right-hand side, the tipped over wine glass with the spilled content bringing highlight to the title of the novel. The title "Eight Weeks of Bruce" leads into the assumption that the spilled wine and the eight weeks of Bruce must be a boyfriend or story of a past relationship.
When the consumer reads the back cover they with discover that the book "is the second book by New York writer Maya Contreras, exploring her relationship with a full-time alcoholic".
Like I said earlier, you never get a romance novel mixed up with a mystery novel because society has trained us to read the book cover in certain ways. The marketing of this book cover is dead on. It's simple, but it blends text and smart-design to create a marketable piece.
BUT THEN...
If so much of what book cover design has evolved into is largely a brick-and-mortar marketing tool, then what place does a ‘cover’ hold in our digital book age? Especially after you purchase it? But, more tellingly, even before you purchase it?
AMAZON:
Since the closing of Borders Books and Music, the book industry began acknowleding something that we already knew. We buy our books online now. The book industry last year sold 50 percent of books online or through digital sources.
On Amazon.com the cover is an afterthought.
This is what cover's look like on Amazon. It's there, kinda:
When the consumer looks at these images, it is clear that the cover isn't the same marketing tool that it was when books were primary found in the books store. The book cover is so small on Amazon.com. The size of the image relative to the overwhelming amount of text involved with the webpage make the image appear almost irrelevant. All it is doing is representing what the physical book should look like, but it's size (about 200 pixels) is lost in all the other information on the page.
Great cover designs like Edward Carson's get lost in all the other gunk on the page. The other text on the page ranges from irrelevant bits offering the consumer deals on something--or promotes another book similar to the one that the consumer is looking at--to information and reviews on the book. Why does the cover get so lost on the webpage? and if its so lost and irrelevant on the page, what do we hunt for when Book searching?
Data.
The cover might help indicate what the text is, but today people are hunting down and searching for Consumer Ratings, Editorial Reviews, little blurbs from people--even people that we might know. We are looking for ways to measure this book outside of it's cover, the marketing piece. With all the information available on the page, the book cover becomes an afterthought on Amazon.com.But then, What about the Kindle?
For all you folks that don’t know what a Kindle is: You have
been living under a rock for the last 7 years.
Since November, 2007, Kindle has been holding onto half (if
not a little more than that) of the market for e-readers. This device in its
most basic form allows you to shop, download, and read books from Amazon’s
online store. Basically, the kindle is a vital potion of the digital, reading
age.
So when I say: The Kindle has taken the cover completely out
of the reading process making it comparable to the "save" button in
Microsoft Software, I mean, it’s taken the cover away from about 50 percent of the
consumers that are reading digitally. i.e. a device to read books from has made the book
cover irrelevant.
Clicking on a title in your Kindle’s text-only reading list (Fig. 1) thrusts you straight onto the first page of the first chapter. (Fig. 2) Front matter — copyright, table of contents — and, yes, the cover are skipped over. In the Steve Jobs biography, you have to press the back button more than fifteen times (Fig. 3 — still not there) to get to the cover on a Kindle. (Mod)
The cover has been removed from the book process on a Kindle digital reading interface. After you purchase the book online, with the little icon cover page--the cover becomes irrelevant. Where as, if you had the physical book: the cover would be staring at you every time you set the book down (or the spine would face out of your bookcase).
As Professor Downs has pointed out to me there is a “ "Cover View" setting for looking at the device contents with, and will never use that stupid text-list ever again”.
....my response being....
You mean you can set it to a cover view? I didn’t know…and then my follow up question: why wasn’t this an automatic thing? Why isn’t the cover view an automatic—default setting, and why do we think it should be?
Because to our generation the cover still holds “content” value. My mother uses an ereader, and I ask her how she selects her books, and she said (and I’m paraphrasing): that she does it the same way she does when she is in the store or at the library—she looks at the cover (and title), if she likes the cover she reads about the author and flap cover. To her, and Downs---the cover still holds a value, perhaps this “cover view” setting are for old timers like Downs and me that see the cover and connect the image to the book.
Either modality that you read the Kindle from still changes how the reader interacts with the cover. When you come back to a text, and pick up the kindle after you’re a “certain” percentage in, you still don’t experience the cover the same way. When scrolling through the “covers” or “titles” to find the one that you have been reading you click on the image (favicon) and it takes you to your last place in the text. From there you scroll through, and read.
With physical book in your hand, you flip open the cover, and every time you set the text down the reader is confronted by the cover design. we connect them not only in an image to content every time we leave the text, but in how we see or intereact with the image doesn’t solely stop (for the title view version of Kindle) with the purchasing of the book off of Amazon, the image is a part of the readers’ meaning making process when encountering the text.
I believe that removing the cover from this modality of reading allows the cover to become irrelevant—the text is allowed to stand alone, it’s another way that the literary world is separating text from author, or text from the cover (we now can’t use the book cover to help us make meaning of the book--- like some literary theories don’t use the author to determine interpretation of the book).
So basically…the book cover has been killed off.
At the same time, the cover has been killed off and brought back like a bad soap opera show.
Not only has the kindle restricted how readers interact with the cover, the cover (as I have said over and over) is an icon, no larger than 200 pixels restricting (LITERALLY) how much the cover interacts with the reader as they shop, and scroll through their ereader.
Soooo....then, what is the cover doing today if it's become an icon to represent a book online, and it has been practically removed from the Kindle?
Because to our generation the cover still holds “content” value. My mother uses an ereader, and I ask her how she selects her books, and she said (and I’m paraphrasing): that she does it the same way she does when she is in the store or at the library—she looks at the cover (and title), if she likes the cover she reads about the author and flap cover. To her, and Downs---the cover still holds a value, perhaps this “cover view” setting are for old timers like Downs and me that see the cover and connect the image to the book.
Either modality that you read the Kindle from still changes how the reader interacts with the cover. When you come back to a text, and pick up the kindle after you’re a “certain” percentage in, you still don’t experience the cover the same way. When scrolling through the “covers” or “titles” to find the one that you have been reading you click on the image (favicon) and it takes you to your last place in the text. From there you scroll through, and read.
With physical book in your hand, you flip open the cover, and every time you set the text down the reader is confronted by the cover design. we connect them not only in an image to content every time we leave the text, but in how we see or intereact with the image doesn’t solely stop (for the title view version of Kindle) with the purchasing of the book off of Amazon, the image is a part of the readers’ meaning making process when encountering the text.
I believe that removing the cover from this modality of reading allows the cover to become irrelevant—the text is allowed to stand alone, it’s another way that the literary world is separating text from author, or text from the cover (we now can’t use the book cover to help us make meaning of the book--- like some literary theories don’t use the author to determine interpretation of the book).
So basically…the book cover has been killed off.
At the same time, the cover has been killed off and brought back like a bad soap opera show.
Not only has the kindle restricted how readers interact with the cover, the cover (as I have said over and over) is an icon, no larger than 200 pixels restricting (LITERALLY) how much the cover interacts with the reader as they shop, and scroll through their ereader.
Soooo....then, what is the cover doing today if it's become an icon to represent a book online, and it has been practically removed from the Kindle?
As an icon, the cover has become the representative tool of a save button to Microsoft. It’s an artistic place holder that is now capable of being scrolled/swiped/clicked past to get to information, as Downs coined it: it’s a “tradeable digital hash” meaning that it’s replaceable—irrelevant.
Today we live in an in-between place where people are purchasing books online and in-store. The book cover is slowly becoming an favicon (an icon you click on that takes you to the selling page ask a shortcut icon).
And book cover designers know this, they have met this with a more simple, but still eye catching image for a 200 pixel size.
Because we still have the physical book in the bookstore: the cover is still the protector of the innards (especially when flying off the shelf), but with the digital world, books are "protected" by ubiquity. The books are everywhere and nowhere. They don't need covers like printed book need covers. The cover has changed from a necessity to a small (in size) marketing point. In the digital world, the book cover as we know it is dead.
Well, there you go! The cover is dead, the icon that has taken its place is slowly becoming irrelevant, but the aethetics involved with the evolution will probably continue to become more simple (like the finger print above).
My Works Cited page: here:)
TODAY TODAY TODAY
And book cover designers know this, they have met this with a more simple, but still eye catching image for a 200 pixel size.
Because we still have the physical book in the bookstore: the cover is still the protector of the innards (especially when flying off the shelf), but with the digital world, books are "protected" by ubiquity. The books are everywhere and nowhere. They don't need covers like printed book need covers. The cover has changed from a necessity to a small (in size) marketing point. In the digital world, the book cover as we know it is dead.
Well, there you go! The cover is dead, the icon that has taken its place is slowly becoming irrelevant, but the aethetics involved with the evolution will probably continue to become more simple (like the finger print above).
My Works Cited page: here:)
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