Interesting topic, Rachel. I tend to buy more books than I read. I think I collect books as much as I read them. I always have piles in my apartment of books waiting to be read, in addition to the books on my shelves, which are books I've already read that are waiting to be reread. Working full time and being a graduate student hasn't allowed for much time to put a dent into those piles, as it's easier to click "next episode" and just zone out with Netflix when I'm tired than actually pay attention to reading something.
I have started reading more ebooks lately as it seems less inappropriate to log into my Amazon Cloud Reader on my computer at work when I have down time than to open a physical novel. So, probably the last twenty books or so that I've bought have been ebooks. My last buy:
Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan. Though its title certainly seems like something that I would want to read, I only heard about it because it was a suggestion based on some of the other books I've read recently. It's a book that I should totally love: it's about a guy who takes a job at a mysterious bookstore and ends up involved in a quest for immortality begun by a fictionalized version of type designer Aldus Manutius with the help of a girl who works at Google, three-dimensional modeling on his computer, and basically mashes old tech and new tech into this traditional story arc. So, it hits all of my nerd buttons. And the book glows in the dark:
So, even though I'm reading it digitally and it leaves some things to be desired so far in characterization and style, I may have to buy the physical version just to have a book covered in books that glow in the dark.
Which segues into Rachel's other question: what makes me buy a book?
In some cases, I'll choose a certain edition over another because the book, as an object, is more beautiful. (FYI, this is coming from a girl who has framed prints of the covers of
To Kill a Mockingbird and
The Great Gatsby printed on recycled dictionary pages--thanks,
Etsy.) Especially in the case of classic works that get redesigned as a completely swoon-worthy series, beautiful enough for their own shelf or to be displayed as works of art, like the 2010 hardcover set of Fitzgerald works produced by Penguin Hardcover Classics:
Or the various cloth bound series Bickford-Smith also designed for Penguin Hardcover Classics (dream library, these editions...):
That being said, I don't often choose a book just by its cover. I usually buy books that have been recommended to me--that's how I discovered one of my favorites for class today, Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins. If I'm reading a book that hasn't been recommended to me, something just for fun, which these days often means an ebook (as mentioned earlier), that's when I take the cover more into account. Maybe I'm a book snob--well, I am, no maybes about it--I am a book snob, so I tend to equate the level of design skill more closely with the level of writing skill when it comes to ebooks. Poorly designed covers scream self-publishing to me. And self-publishing screams either vanity project or "I don't need an editor" (oh, you do, we all do), or "I've been trying to publish and no one's accepted my work so I'll just publish it myself" (which I get--trying to get published is a long and depressing process with a lot of rejection, but if you're submitting to places that publish work you admire and they're saying no, it just might be that your work needs a little more time). While I don't have many examples of self-published ebook covers that I like (see previous sentence), this cover for Marcus Sakey's The Blade Itself, which was first published independently as an ebook did the trick for me:
Talk about bold. Now, in terms of ebooks, I think designing the cover image is a totally different animal from designing a print book. It has to work at really small sizes. It has to stand out against all the other photos-with-text-on-them images that will be right next to it. This one definitely does that. And talk about crazy bold. The book centers on a reformed criminal whose best friend and former partner in crime (literally) gets out of prison after covering for the protagonist on a previous crime gone bad; the friend thinks he's owed for his prison time and wants help with a kidnapping for ransom. So, yeah, it's on the nose, but holy shit, what a nose. That image definitely stands out. There's an interesting blog post
here where Sakey describes the process of choosing this cover, including putting the three final options on his Facebook page to let his readers decide. And, for your viewing/comparison pleasure, here's the somewhat less interesting design for the hardcover/paperback after Sakey built up a following and Macmillan put it out on their
Minotaur imprint, which appears to be all thrillers, all the time:
