No matter how often people may claim otherwise with the old saying, first impressions are important, even (or perhaps especially) when we’re talking about books. I definitely think the book cover is important, and reading and listening to insights on how they are designed was really interesting. Something I thought was particularly notable was in the TED Talk, when he describes the job of cover designing as somehow like translating. Certainly, when we translate, I feel like it is not so much that we are just trying to move words from one language to another, but rather we are trying to capture some sense behind the words, and how they feel to a native speaker of the language; and from how it is described, cover designing seems to be a very similar job to that – for instance, I think of the example he raised of the two biographies, where both were about a person’s life, but since one felt more like a conversation and the other like a detailed observation log, their respective covers were words and a picture.
I do think the point about e-books raised both in the article and the video was worth consideration. The designer mentions that there is an experience you can only get with physical books, which I definitely do agree with to an extent, and this is supported by the statistics cited in the article, where the paper edition of 1Q84 vastly outsold the digital edition. There is definitely something about the way a physical book can interact with our five senses that are somehow lost when moving to the digital. However, I do wonder if there are ways to enhance the digital cover in some way which we could not replicate in the physical.
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