judge a book by its cover

The persistence of paper books and bookstores

When you think about it, it makes sense that ebooks did not push paper books out of the market.

Most people only read a few books a year–or none at all. The hardcore book reader is not your average person. What makes more sense to these people:

  • Spend $20 on two paperbacks per year (rounding to $10 each for convenience), or…
  • Spend anywhere from around $80-200+ on an ebook reader, plus $20 for two ebooks

Let’s take the Amazon Kindle Paperwhite as an example. It costs $160 Canadian (on sale as I type this for $125). $160 would buy you 16 books at $10 each. That means someone might need to read for eight years before the Kindle purchase breaks even, so to speak. After that, you get the advantages of an ereader and ebooks. But eight years is a long time. Too long for most people, I suspect, and so they just continue to buy the occasional paperback. And unless you’re content to peruse the meagre selection of books at a drugstore or similar place, the place you go to is a bookstore, hence the persistence of bookstores. Well, there are undoubtedly hardcore readers who also simply prefer paper to an electronic reading experience, too, and they probably play a big part in sustaining bookstores.

Bookstores have the advantage of letting you see piles of books on shelves, where covers can grab you (or turn you away), an experience that simply can’t be replicated by an online store–even one selling actual paper books (though that was how Amazon started, and it remains a successful system for them).

Although I’m nearly 100% ereading these days, I do sometimes wax nostalgic about bookstores and just wandering the sections and seeing what was new, or in stock, or would randomly draw my eye. I tried using the BookBub newsletter for a time to sort-of replicate this, looking over its random bargain offerings, but got burned by too many mediocre novels. To be fair, when I was reading in my late teens and early 20s, the same thing often happened when I picked up bargain books at places like Book Warehouse.

All of this was inspired by a comment about a kind of bookstore that was slain by the rise of the web–the computer bookstore. Yes, somewhere I have a copy of C++ for Dummies. Also, JavaScript, HTML and others. Learn to code in 21 days! As far as I know, these bookstores are completely gone now, since the information in these books is now copious, often free and more up-to-date online. In every way this is better, yet it’s still another experience that I once found enjoyable and is gone forever.

Time marches on.

And now, back to my ebook…

2019 Bestseller instant success template

Easy steps:

  1. Write a book about something. Whatever, it doesn’t matter.
  2. Include f*ck in the title, in the manner of “not caring/don’t care”, not in the manner of the carnal act
  3. Include girl in the title, in the manner of a female human
  4. OK, just use this title: The Girl Who Didn’t Give a F*ck
  5. Market it as both a thriller and self-help
  6. Rake in $$$

Tune in next year for the next word/phrase to add to sell even more copies.

When lurid book covers work (Fade-Out edition)

Recently I was participating in a discussion on great science fiction novels and I trotted out one of my favorites that I read way back when I was all of 14 years old, Fade-Out, by Patrick Tilley. A slightly expanded/modified version of the novel was later released that I read as an adult and the story still holds up. That edition featured this cover tiny image ahead, I may scan in my copy just so it’s legible):

Black with a glowing orange-red circle that could signify almost anything. Not very arresting as far as images go (and for some reason this particular scan makes the title impossible to see).

However, the original Dell SF (US) cover on the copy I bought in 1978 was this:

A monstrous mechanical spider in front of the Capitol Building with masses fleeing in panic. A classic flying saucer hovering above. A title done in that cheesy chrome look. How could I resist? I couldn’t!

The great part is that the event depicted on this sensationalist cover does not happen in the book. Nothing even close to it happens — though there is a mechanical spider. And it does take place on Earth, as the inclusion of the Capitol Building would suggest. But otherwise, it’s a mashup that deliberately distorts to create a more exciting image — and it worked! If I had encountered the revised cover in 1978 I’d likely have never picked the book up.

On the one hand, this leads me to think that I should judge a book by its cover (cool cover = cool book) and shouldn’t judge a book by its cover (dull cover = dull book). Since the same book had both a dull and cool cover and especially since the cool cover was a load of hooey, my conclusion is: book covers are hooey. Read the first few pages and see if you like what you see instead.