I’m
one of those people who can’t read a book without buying it, even when I can’t
or shouldn’t afford it. I may skimp on other things, but not books. There’s
something indescribably special about owning each book you’ve read—holding it,
displaying it, smelling the ink and paper, looking at the cover, possessing
each work that occupied your mind for days or weeks. These days, in the era of
iTunes and Kindle, such obsession about a collection of books seems almost
archaic. Maybe I was born a generation or two too late.
So
it was interesting to read this morning about another casualty of the evolving
e-book phenomenon: spying on others’ reading choices. Used to be, if you’re on
the bus or subway and the person across from you was reading a book, you could
look at the cover, get a feel for the work and the person reading it, perhaps
jot down the title for future reference. Now, with the growing popularity of
electronic readers, that’s getting harder to do.
In
today’s New York Times, book critic Motoko Rich writes, “You can’t tell a book
by its cover if it doesn’t have one.”
“
‘There’s something about having a beautiful book that looks intellectually
weighty and yummy,’ said [Bindu] Wiles, who recalled that when she was
rereading Anna Karenina recently, she liked that people could see the cover on
the subway. ‘You feel kind of proud to be reading it.’ With a Kindle or Nook, she said, ‘people would never know.’ ”
The
loss of a physical cover affects more than just readers; publishers and
bookstores rely on fetching covers to generate sales. So the publishing world
is adapting to the new reality. “Even in the digital era, publishers believe
that books need graphic representations—if only for the online marketing
campaign,” writes Rich. “Regardless of the format, ‘they all seem to need what
we know of as a cover to identify them,’ said Chip Kidd, associate art director
at Alfred A. Knopf. Mr. Kidd has designed more than 1,000 jackets for authors
including Cormac McCarthy and James Ellroy.”