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Is the book cover dead?
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dustydigger
Posted 2012-07-18 10:04 AM (#3784)
Subject: Is the book cover dead?



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Location: UK		/Interesting article about the possible demise of the book cover in the MIT technology review.Its all a bit doom and gloom,but I hold out hope for SF covers,they may turn out to be the last bastian of glory in cover design.

''I am something of a book cover art enthusiast, a man geeky enough to have once bragged about having met Chip Kidd in an elevator. (Who? My point exactly.)

And so its with great interest that I read, over at the Atlantic, Betsy Moraiss take on the promise and peril the Kindle holds for the art of the book cover. I often lament the loss of the feeling of a books heft in your hands, the way it folds open over your knee, the smell of paper, and all those other fusty, visceral attachments my kids will one day laugh at me for. For some reason, though, its taken me this long to realize how very much Im worried about the fate of the book cover.

A digital book has no cover, writes Morais. There's no paper to be bound up with a spine and protected inside a sturdy jacket. Browsers no longer roam around Borders scanning the shelves for the right title to pluck. Increasingly, instead, they scroll through Amazon's postage stamp-sized pictures, which don't actually cover anything, and instead operate as visual portals into an entire webpage of data.

One thing we learn from Moraiss reporting is that our technological age was already gumming up the works of book cover design even before e-books came along. Book covers have been in crisis for some time now, says one of her sources. When Amazons webpages become the modern-day equivalent of a Borders bookshelf, theres pressure to design book covers so that they "scan" better as thumbnails. Theres a reason why Michelangelo preferred chapel ceilings to postage stamps. When it comes to a canvas, size matters.

But when God, or Jeff Bezos, closes a graphic design door, does he open a graphic design window? Thats the hope: that e-books will usher in a new era of multimedia book cover creativity. Morais holds up as her heroine longstanding book designer Carin Goldberg, who is offering for the first time a digital editorial design class using the iPad. Her students produced animated book covers, for instance.

But publishing is a business, and a floundering, conservative one at that. Publishers simply dont have the resources to create experimental Googly blue-sky labs whose sole purpose is to play around with new possible futures for book covers. Theyre busy trying to make sure books themselves have much of a future to begin with. Benefits have not yet caught up to the costs of this extra content, Penguins Paul Buckley told Morais. Because the viewer's not going to pay for it.''

Hopefully cover annihilation is a long way away.but I'm sure Sf will hold out for a while yet.






Edited by dustydigger 2012-07-18 10:26 AM
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