The covers are dead!

Dead!

Dead like the record jacket!

Dead like the laser disc sleeve!

Dead like the 8-track cartridge sticker!

Dead like the squishy Disney VHS container!

Dead like the cassette tape insert!

Dead like those damned CD jewel cases and their booklets!

Dead like DVD and Blu-ray box art!

Put 'em all in a box, burn 'em, and sprinkle their ashes over your razed local bookstore. Call it a day. Hang up your exact-o knifes and weld shut your drawers of metal type. The writing's not on the wall but it was on one of those covers you just lit on fire — so we'll never know what it said.

OK — phew. Still here? Great.

If digital covers as we know them are so ‘dead,’ why do we hold them so gingerly? Treat them like print covers? We can't hurt them. They're dead. So let's start hacking. Pull them apart, cut them into bits and see what we come up with.

This is an essay for book lovers and designers curious about where the cover has been, where it's going, and what the ethos of covers means for digital book design. It's for those of us dissatisfied with thoughtlessly transferring print assets to digital and closing our eyes.

The cover as we know it really is — gasp — ‘dead.’ But it's dead because the way we touch digital books is different than the way we touch physical books. And once you acknowledge that, useful corollaries emerge.

Paula Fox writes in her memoir, The Coldest Winter: “I touched his signature as though it had been his face.”1 It's this kind of intimacy with which we touch physical books, too.

We don't want the cover to disappear.

And so we don’t want the cover to disappear. And yet the cover as we have known it is disappearing, rather quickly (nearly eradicated on hardware Kindles). This doesn’t mean it won’t be replaced. Whatever it’s replaced with, however, will not serve the same purpose as the covers with which we’ve grown up.

This romanticism is curious, if only because the cover whose loss we lament is a recent invention. Matthew Battles writes in his book, Library: An Unquiet History:

“The people who shelve the books in Widener talk about the library’s breathing — at the start of the term, the stacks exhale books in great swirling clouds; at end of term, the library inhales, and the books fly back.”2

I can’t help but imagine all these flying books as leather bound. Thick, dusty, uniform and effectively ‘coverless’ by modern standards. Place them face-up on a table and they look identical: shielded and important but also anonymous. Only the scuffs and wear in the leather tell a story. And that story doesn't say much about what's inside.

Here, the cover is a protector of the signatures and the binding. It allows the books to fly in and out of the stacks a thousand times, and still be usable. In the digital world, our books are protected by ubiquity. They are everywhere and nowhere. They multiply effortlessly and can fly continuously without damage or rot. They don't need covers like printed book need covers.

My awareness and relationship with covers began almost a decade ago.

I was nineteen when I walked into Kinokuniya on the east side of Shinjuku station. At the time I knew nothing about Japan or making books. It was my first visit to a Japanese bookstore and, like most of my experiences then with things Japanese, I was amused, full of curiosity, and inspired. The place was bathed in a typically drab and corporate Japanese fluorescence, but drabness be damned, I distinctly recall the delight felt from picking up books at random. They were all so ... rational.3

Kenya Hara, Designing Design

It wouldn't be until years later that I realized this sense of rationality stemmed from a respect for readers. The books were sized perfectly for your back pocket or bag. Giant volumes were split into smaller tomes. The paper was elegant. The binding strong. Bookmarks glued in. But looking back, I was struck most of all by the austere covers. Little Hara Kenyas everywhere. Expanses of whitespace splashed with well considered marks of ink. One color. Restrained photography. Pretty books. Lots of 'em.4

There were racks of these minimal bricks. In fact, the vast majority fell under this careful aesthetic. In aggregate, this aesthetic formed a unified cultural voice. A rational system. The impact of this experience has stuck with me this past decade and deeply informed all of my design work. I continually ask myself: “How does one develop a design language or ecosystem that tempers itself? That somehow keeps from spiraling out of control?”

Seeing this shed new light on book covers in the west. In contrast, the shelves of our bookstores seemed — and seem — far more chaotic. And as you trace back through the history of the cover, there's a sense that it's getting visually louder.

Fewer bookstores.

Less shelves.

It's unsurprising, really. There are fewer bookstores. Less shelves. And therefore more competition around attention. This results in an ever escalating shouting match between covers. But with the present digital inflection, the role of the cover is changing radically; disappearing in some cases. It doesn't need to shout anymore because it doesn't serve the same purpose.

This shift presents a wonderful chance for designers to break from thinking of a cover as an individual asset, and certainly a chance to break from a tight coupling with the marketing department. In a sense, it's a chance to play again. To hack. And I can't help but feel that elements of the design of our future digital books should take to heart the craftsmanship and metered rationality embedded in so much Japanese book design.

Of course, not all western covers shout. In fact, the past few decades have sheltered some astounding work. The iconic compositions of Chip Kidd, the art direction of John Gall, the illustrative touches of Grey318 or Ben Wiseman, the classic typography of Birdsall, and David Pearson's, Helen Yentus', and Peter Mendelsund's beautiful series design.

These designers find ways to make exciting — through illustration or creative debossings or other hacks — a space that's remained largely unchanged for a hundred years. Their covers occupy a point of convergence blending austerity, sensitivity, reverence for the text and, of course, marketing:5

David Pearson Chip Kidd's hardcover work for Murakami Haruki's Wind Up Bird Chronicle Helen Yentus' series work for Camus Gray318 branding Foer

But covers like this are the exception.6

Which raises the question — if so much of what book cover design has evolved into is largely a brick-and-mortar marketing tool, then what place does a ‘cover’ hold in digital books? Especially after you purchase it? But, more tellingly, even before you purchase it?

The collapse of Borders Books & Music shed light on what we already knew: we buy books online. Almost all of them. And yet, on Amazon.com the cover is nearly an afterthought.

Sure, it’s there, sort of:

Best new books Recent releases Individual book

Looking at these images, it's clear: the cover is no longer the marketing tool it once was.

The covers here on Amazon.com are tiny on the search results page. Minuscule on new books page. And they're all but lost in the datum slush of the individual item pages. Great covers like Mendelsund's design for The Information disappear entirely.

We're looking for metrics other than images.

Why? Because — What do we now hunt when buying books? Data.

The cover image may help quickly ground us, but our eyes are drawn by habit to number and quality of reviews. We’re looking for metrics other than images — real metrics — not artificial marketing signifiers. Blurbs from humans. Perhaps even humans we know! And within the jumble of the Amazon.com interface, the cover feels all but an afterthought.

Fig. 1 Fig. 2 Fig. 3

The hardware Kindle completely hacked — in the most common sense of the word — the cover out of the reading process.

Clicking on a title in your Kindle’s text-only reading list (Fig. 1) thrusts you straight onto the first page of the first chapter. (Fig. 2) Front matter — copyright, table of contents — and, yes, the cover are skipped over. In the most recent Steve Jobs biography, you have to press the back button more than fifteen times (Fig. 3 — still not there) to get to the cover on a hardware Kindle. Which is a shame because certain black and white photography looks stunning on eink displays:

More of this please — Eink + B&W Photography

This user experience flow isn't a product of any hardware limitation. It's a set of decisions clearly designed around efficiency (and, possibly, data) — get us into the text as quickly as possible. Of course, this efficiency comes at the expense of intimacy.

We jump in and out of digital texts with little to no procession. In contrast, every time you set down a physical book, the cover is staring up at you. And every time you pick it back up, you have to go “through” the cover to get to the text. Do that five times and you'll never forget the title or author.7

The Conference of the Birds8 — designed by Farah Behbehani and published in 2009 by Thames & Hudson, is an example of what covers (and the front matter into which they lead) do when executed masterfully: initiate procession.

After plying open the Amazon (of course!) box, you're greeted by an exquisite cloth slipcase (cover #1):

Slipcase

Inside that, the book. The design on the cloth cover (cover #2) plays off the design of the slipcase. And inside that, wonderful end papers.

Cover and Slipcase Endpages

Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. We're brought into the book. Each subsequent spread sets the tone as we're led into the front matter. The papers, the quality of printing, the balanced design cues; before you reach the table of contents, you know Farah Behbehani does not fuck around.

Table of Contents

Once you're finally in the book — the Kindle equivalent of ‘page 1’ — you've gone from opening a cardboard box to a place of understanding. This is achieved through design nuance and production decisions — all of which are a response to the constraints defined by the physicality of books.

Interior

These parts of a physical book exist because they're functional.

This isn't to say digital books need to have a faux slipcase, cloth textures, ‘endpages’ or half-titles. These parts of a physical book exist because they're functional. They're born from precedent. These are facts often overlooked in digital book design. Very rarely do we ask, Why?



Why the cover? To protect the innards.

Why a half-title? It's a hold-over from when there weren't covers.

Why cloth? Cloth is a damn fine material in which to wrap stuff you want to protect.

There is a tremendous opportunity for book designers and software engineers to figure out what our digital book procession should be. There's clearly something lost when you're thrown into a text without context — but how should that context be delivered? What 'function' should a cover serve in the digital book space? And even: What is the cover?

In iBooks and the iPad Kindle app, covers are reduced to thumbnails barely 200 pixels high. Most typography is rendered nearly illegible. And as certain books become applications, their covers become icons.

The loss shared among all physical media as it shifts digital.

There is symmetry of loss shared among all physical media as it shifts digital. The ever shrinking book cover parallels the long, slow compression of music jackets. The designers of records must have felt a similar sense of constriction with cassettes and then CDs and now Rdio/iTunes thumbnails. So much lost canvas.

In a 20109 essay on covers, James Bridle smartly points out: publishers relinquish control when books go digital.

[W]e need to recognize that [cover] reproduction is out of our control: they will be copied, linked, and reposted, at different resolutions and sizes … We might also recognize that there are potentially many different jobs for the cover to do.

So how do you combat this lack of control? You design for total flexibility.

Poke!

Seth Godin’s Domino publishing imprint embraces and codifies the diminishing cover.

The first Domino book, Poke the Box, has no words on the cover, just a line drawing of an excited man. To which Mr. Godin explains to readers confused by the lack of words:

“Who needs them? ﻿When you see the book online, it's always accompanied by lots of text. You read the text on the screen, the cover is the icon.”10

This is an ethos embracing book covers in the context of an Amazon.com sales page.

On the flip-side of this is Jason Santa Maria's minimalist design work for the A Book Apart imprint.11 Type and bold colors; large, condensed, sans-serif letters on a bright background. And these, too, work well at almost any size.