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Judging Book Covers

   September 23rd, 2010

Book Title Fail - How to raise your daughter without reading a bookWith the demise of Bloglines, I've been going through all the posts I had bookmarked and pulling out the ones I wanted to mention in a post - this is one of those posts.

Something I really like about feed aggregators is that, by reading feeds from a wide variety of sources, it is possible to spot coincidental trends (which I like doing). For instance, a couple weeks ago I noticed a few of posts all about book covers:

Of course, this isn't a new trend - Awful Library Books has been around awhile, and I've talked about book covers, too.

And speaking of book covers, remember to play with LibraryThing's CoverGuess, to help build a database that can answer questions like, "well, I don't remember the title, but it was a red book, and had like this guy on a street with maybe like a purple penguin?"

Update: I forgot to include my two biggest book cover pet peeves:

  • Covers where the author's name is bigger than the title
  • Cook books where the chef (usually a celebrity) is more prominently-featured than the food

Those to things always make me suspicious.




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One Response to “Judging Book Covers”

  1. Gamer Librarian Says:

    Ah, but your RSS feeds missed 3/4ths of the Fantasy Cover Art charts. All are from Orbit books. The Orbit blog goes into more depth and analysis (some of which is hilarious), and there are comments by some rather witty Orbit readers.

    Chart Number 1, which Boing Boing found, is on general trends:
    http://www.orbitbooks.net/2010/08/16/the-chart-of-fantasy-art-part-one/

    Chart Number 2 is on Urban Fantasy heroines and the trends in their cover appearances:
    http://www.orbitbooks.net/2010/08/17/the-chart-of-fantasy-art-part-2-urban-fantasy/

    Chart Number 3 is on Dragons, and which colors got cover appearances this year (my favorites, the blue dragons, were mostly ignored, but not as badly as white dragons).
    http://www.orbitbooks.net/2010/08/19/the-chart-of-fantasy-art-part-3-dragons/

    Chart Number 4 is similar to a tag cloud, showing which words were used in titles this past year. It was a dark time…
    http://www.orbitbooks.net/2010/08/19/the-chart-of-fantasy-art-part-4-title-trends/

    According to Orbit, an intern got this assignment, and appears to have done some solid research!