EBook As Stepchild

"But today, if you’re a publisher who knows his company’s work is going to be mostly discovered via an online review or a search engine, does that create an incentive to dial back the expense of book cover design to the point of being almost an afterthought? And is relying on software such as Photoshop and Illustrator to design covers for e-books a throwback to the late ’60s and early 1970s, when every book cover seemed to look almost the same? (Those days certainly made life easy for a designer: set type in Helvetica, add abstract graphic image, move on to next project. Rinse and repeat.)"

This is from an article that seems to be positive about the digital reading experience and yet ...let me Fisk that one glaring sentence.

Him:

"does that create an incentive to dial back the expense of book cover design to the point of being almost an afterthought?"

My translation:

Ebooks are thrown together and cover design is an afterthought.

Not when they can cost $600, cover art is not an afterthought.  It's a bloody marketing tool, pal.

The article is like yeah, ebooks are great for reading the classics and de Tocqueville (which, yes, Mr Elitist, I also have on my Nook Color) but...well there's not that great Book Smell (trademark pending) and carrying a book around makes you look so...bookish.  So in with the In-Crowd.

If you have a Kindle, which someone gave this guy he couldn't even manage to make himself buy a reader, your reading world is in black and white.  That's the past.  The future is tablets.  Color, streaming video, music, games, and every version of Angry Birds available.

I do not love it when people analyze and criticize something they know so little about.

And you just found the Internet Wayback Machine???  Sheesh.
PS it's for websites, not books.

http://archive.org

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