Bookmark: Book Covers
There’s a mysterious man on the subway. He’s reading a book that you’ve read. There’s something roguish or attractive about him that you can see in his face and in the way he carries himself, even though he’s half hidden by the book he’s reading. You’re interested or maybe just tipsy enough to go over and talk to him. You casually point to that book he’s reading, the one you’ve read too. And you start a conversation.
It’s a scenario most of us have played out before, whether as the one approached or the one using the book as a pretext to get to know someone. Some of us have even met future husbands or wives this way.
The Spanish have a term for a chaperone who sometimes accompanies a couple on their first date: the chaperone is a dueño if it’s a man, a dueña if it’s a woman. The ebook revolution has killed the dueño of reading: the book cover. You’ll no longer be able to have Gabriel García Márquez or Jane Austen chaperone you through your first hesitant and shy conversation as you talk as strangers about books you are reading, hoping perhaps for more intimacy or a longer conversation to get to know one another better. That’s because book covers are already a casualty of the digital age.
Ebooks make a token concession to book covers in two ways. The first is by letting you see the cover on the web page where the ebooks are sold. The second is by often including the cover within the ebook itself. (However, some e-readers like Kindle skip right past the cover and go straight to where the book starts at chapter one.)
The demise of the book cover is a sad one, especially when you consider that many covers are works of art, as well as historical artifacts. Just consider the wild colors and bold lines of 1920s Russian book covers by Alexander Rodchenko, the lurid romance covers of the 1980s that featured Fabio, or even the way any book cover would fade to muted shades of blue if the book was out in the sun for too long in a storefront window. That’s all gone now.
But you also have to consider that artistic book covers as we now know them are recent innovations. They’ve only been around for a hundred years. Before then, if a book had a cover at all, it was simply functional and undecorated, made to protect the book from excess wear and tear. At best, the covers would be gilt and hand-tooled from leather. They were symbolic encrustations of wealth rather than functions of advertising.
With digital books, though, you won’t be able to catch a glimpse of the book that the airplane passenger sitting next to you is reading, so you won’t be able to strike up a conversation quite as quickly. There’s hope, though. I saw a recent tech innovation that lets you slip an iPhone into a special eInk sleeve so you can see images on both sides, and I thought it would be an amazing opportunity to show off book covers again, to beam the cover of the book you’re reading onto the face of the device for everyone to see. And perhaps it won’t be long before future tablets have glass screens on both sides that let you do the same thing. Maybe e-readers will start to show the book covers as screensavers. But there’s a silver lining to the loss of book covers: the actual text of the book itself will come more to the forefront.
I can see a time when people will browse for books based on the content of the book, not the cover. Retailers will rank books for you based on the interior text. They’ll automatically assess what a book’s about and present the information to you when you need to make a purchasing decision. The loss of covers means that when you think back to an ebook you enjoyed, you’ll perhaps recall more of the content of the book than the cover. You’ll solidify more of the book’s meaning in your mind rather than conjure up an image of the cover (which, by the way, is often created by a graphic designer who has never even read the book).
Still, for me at least, it’s devastating how ebook covers are an appendix-like afterthought, tacked into books but rarely seen. At best, you see book covers on your e-reader’s virtual bookshelf, but they’re micro-sized and just a couple of pixels wide. I hate to say it, but I don’t want to see book covers disappear! I’m almost tempted to wallpaper the inside of my home with book covers so I can be reminded of all my former books, all of them as familiar to me as friends. Because somehow, whenever I see a book with my mind’s eye, I don’t recall the text inside or abstract ideas it may have contained, but I do see the cover. For me, in a very real way, the cover is the book.
Am I alone in my appreciation of book covers? Let me know what you think about them, for good or for bad. And let me know what your favorite book cover is or any ideas you have for salvaging book covers in the digital age!
Libraries
Take a walk, if you will, through a university library, through one of the areas where nobody ever goes, like the section on 1870s foreign literature. Northwestern University outside of Chicago has a great library, and if you peruse its desolate dusty sections, you’ll chance upon tomes from the era when books were bound with intricate marbled covers, a book-binding tradition that sadly is in decline. If you’re lucky enough to find such a marbled book, you’ll perhaps marvel at all its whorls and frothy bubbles, at all the inky emulsions! And the smells, the deliciously antique smell of old books, so musty, so brittle, so familiar but so sad.
A Kindle or iPad will never smell quite so lovely in its decline. If anything, it will smell of polyethylene and be frazzled like an overheated hair dryer. If it’s white, it will take on the vaguely urine-colored tint that all old plastic gets when it ages.
But no e-reader will last as long as any book you’ll find in a library. Kobos and Nooks and other devices will be relegated to sock drawers and trash bins, or lost in the garage sales and swap meets of techno-commodity fetishism. Devices like the Kindle have a lot of sales appeal, but only for a limited lifespan.
While the Kindle1 had such great demand in 2007 that it sold out in five hours and sold on eBay for 400 percent of the original price, it’s doubtful that you could sell a Kindle1 today. There’s always a later and greater device on the market. Companies who manufacture consumer products know this and design with this technical obsolescence in mind. As they’re manufacturing the device that will hit the shelves tomorrow, they’re already at work on its replacement.
While the reading hardware may age, the ebook content—being digital—is eternal. And likewise, because it’s digital, it’s possible to have a near-infinite number of copies of a given digital book. Perversely, though, your local library is only likely to have a handful of copies of a given digital book. Why is this?
Libraries have a fixed budget every year for what books they can purchase. So whether a given library wants to buy a print or a digital copy of a book, it’s still going to have to pay for that book. That means that if you’re late returning an ebook, you may still have to pay late fees (or, more humanely, the ebook will simply turn itself off and return to the library for another patron to use, even if you weren’t finished reading it). This is because only a fixed number of patrons at a time can borrow the ebook from a library.
So even though digital inventory is infinite—even though all the patrons of the library could, in theory, download the same copy of the ebook at the same time, licensing terms will prohibit that from happening. Yes, you’ll still have to reserve a digital ebook, just as you do a print book. The real benefit is that you’ll be able to check out and download your library ebooks from anywhere. You’re not going to need to go to a library to do that.