Then I thought about what I do, and I’ve been on both sides of the situation. My favorite book of all time is a book that had, at the time I first read it, perhaps the worst cover of all time.

Watership Down by Richard Adams.

When I first read that book, it had an ugly beige-brown cover with a simple, monochrome, old-fashioned stencil of a rabbit above the four points of a compass. Very simple. Very unattractive. Very boring. Favorite book ever.

But, I think there are some genres of books (fantasy/adventure/sci-fi, for example) where the cover attempts to capture the essence of what you are about to read. You can get a feel for what story aspects might be emphasized in the book. Or not. LOL. But that’s what you think when you look at it.

I think books have some of the same issues music does. How do you get into the hands of the consumer? There’s so much out there, it’s a sea of choices. Any book might be fantastic…or terrible. So a cover that has a bit of zing to it might have a better chance of getting to the checkout aisle.

Anyway, thanks for the amazing piece, and the thoughts it provoked. I enjoyed my trip down memory lane as I contemplated the books I’ve read, and my attempts to recall the covers of those books to determine whether those covers might have influenced my decision to read them in the first place.

I ran a makeshift experiment once when I was people watching in B&N. I asked people in the coffee area if they’d participate in a really quick experiment. If they said yes, I provided a stack of 5 fiction books, and asked them to decide which two they were hypothetically going to purchase. It was a fascinating experiment.

More often than not, the book jacket was the final deciding factor. Awards received and reviews on the jacket had nothing to do the decision. Granted there was no rhyme or reason to the people I asked and the sample size was small, I think there’s probably some interesting psychology behind this. And I think whatever it is that makes us more perceptive to visually appealing graphics, causes people to miss out on some really great writing.

I’m not really sure this is the problem. I have no empirical evidence, but I would be surprised if people choose not to buy books based on the cover all that often. Perhaps it is that people do not take that book as an option for their purchasing choices.

There are a lot of books in Borders and B&N. Customers who know what they want are not interested in covers anyway, they are there for a particular book. Customers who are looking for something interesting usually have to look over the spines and occasional covers of hundreds, or even thousands of books. They cannot possibly evaluate them all on literary merit to find a book that interests them, and so are much more likely to pull out a few eye catching ones, and then decide from that point which book to purchase.