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Breaking the mould?
Posted by Neil Ayres, 22 October 2009, 10:08 Permalink Comments (10)
As the book industry struggles to come to grips with the challenges to print sales presented by ebooks, accelerated by the arrival on UK shores this week of Amazon’s Kindle, publishers are having to become increasingly inventive with the main selling feature available to them in the shops: the book cover.
Scholastic Press has released a wonderfully-covered version of Chris Wooding’s Young Adult novel Malice (a book about London teens who get trapped inside a nasty comic book). With the hardback version of the book out in the US this month, the new edition has a cover bearing a 3-D plastic figure and title, the brainchild of Alison Padley, Scholastic’s UK design manager.
Alison Padley's 'flat design' for the 3D cover of Malice
Padley commissioned and art directed artist Dan Chernett's comic book-style illustrations for the interior of the book and the cover, and coupled these with a 3-D moulding technique. “I thought when I initially saw it that the moulding would be great to use on a book cover at some point, since as far as I know that had never before been done.”
Using one of Chernett’s illustrations of Tall Jake, a character who transports the protagonists into the book’s fantasy world, she made a flat design and consulted with Claire Tagg, Scholastic's production director. “There are five levels of depth in the mould,” Padley says. “So basically we considered what points in the artwork stand out most and went from there. As the printer worked, he sent us emails of the various stages.” Tagg comments that, even with the special cover, the UK version of Malice is still priced at the standard paperback rate.
Printer proofs of Malice's moulded cover
An increasingly used technique for mainstream hardbacks is the printed laminated cover, which removes the need for a dustjacket. Pioneered a couple of years ago by independent publisher Canongate with Scarlett Thomas’ The End of Mr Y, the process is being used for Acts of Violence, debut author Ryan David Jahn's forthcoming novel from Macmillan New Writing.
Will Atkins, Macmillan’s Editorial Director for Fiction says:
“PLC novels remain fairly unusual, and in the case of Acts of Violence this minimal, less fussy treatment matches the starkness of the cover image (something that’s emphasised by the blood red endpapers), which in turn reflects the spare-ness and immediacy of the writing. It’s also b-format – an unusual size for a hardback.”
Macmillan’s hope for Acts of Violence is that these design elements appeal to the book's core readership, but are distinctive enough to seduce those attracted by strong design to pick it up off the shelves.
Picador's new release, Dr Ragab's Universal Language also lacks a dustjacket, and has gold foiling in addition to the print added straight to the cover. The cover for Acts of Violence was designed in-house by Stuart Wilson
But with the Kindle increasing its reach, Sony’s Reader series competing hard with Amazon and the unveiling yesterday of Barnes & Noble’s dual-screen Nook in the US (and its tie-in with Adobe), do innovative cover designs for mainstream novels really have any hope of stalling the mass adoption of ebooks?
Barnes & Noble's Nook, released this week to compete with Amazon's Kindle, has both an e-ink viewer and LCD touchscreen
10 Comments
Tool combated the piracy of 10,000 days by putting on an amazing CD cover http://toolband.pl/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/stereo.jpg... I think that the "collectors" will always want the object, as well as the content... but, we can't think everyone cares as much as "creative people"...
2009-10-22 12:17:49
Innovative... but practical? If this is the future of printed books, I'm not sure how they'll stack up on my bookshelf!
2009-10-22 14:52:55
Shell - It's a kids book and it's more about grabbing attention. It certainly worked for us as we've had the book for ages and the decision to buy was made on the combination of the illustration and 3D effect... and the story is great as well!
2009-10-22 15:04:17
Book readers such as Kindle will I'm sure find a level in the marketplace, but replace books I don't think so! Books, newspapers and magazines are so tactile you can take them anywhere and you don't need a sizeable investment in a reader or constant power to be able to access them. Invoative covers and print treatments will continue to evolve as a defense against this competition, which is great. The printed word will continue to survive.
2009-10-22 23:40:07
What worries me about the Kindle is the threat of "retroactive censorship." Amazon has already pulled back all copies of boos it has sold (admittedly the biggest case was where there was a copyright problem), but the situation is clealy an opening for abuse via governments.
I think I may need to post on this over on my blog...
2009-10-23 05:37:10
Nothing can replace the experience of a book by the texture of paper and smell of print.
2009-10-23 10:25:35
10-15 years ago everybody said that digital won't take over the film in photography,because of it's quality, soul, etc. Look how many people shoot on films today. Only a few who like to oppose and to feel special (for couple more years) But eventually we always give up and we choose what makes things easier and cheaper for us. So those of you saying ...Nothing will replace or I don't think so!, I wanna see you in ten years when you will have only one book reader on your shelf and instead of writing about how the paper smells you will be adoring and arguing that your little machine is better than that other one ;) It's been always like this.
2009-10-23 14:42:10
i find it much easier to take in what i read if i have a physical piece of work just feels natural as breathing.
sod ebooks.
2009-10-24 01:48:32
Adrian - I dont' think the film/digital analogy works. Surely people have adopted digital technology because of the immediacy it allows (you can download your photos straight on to your pc/laptop and see them seconds after shooting instead of having to wait for your photo-lab of choice to work its magic. It's also cheaper - paying for the development of endless not-very-good photos was expensive whereas you can look at your own digital ones and only print the ones you want - or, indeed, download them into an e-frame.
The immediacy effect doesn't apply to books. You buy a real book or you buy an e-book and you just haul off and read it there and then.
Also, with photos, there's the notion of being able to improve your own work - crop, highlight, remove red-eye etc. That also fails to apply with books.
I'm not against e-readers - whatever floats people's boat, basically - but I don't think we're seeing the end of the printed book just yet.
2009-10-26 09:20:49
Make or break time for design. Either promote a quality that users still want, or shift over to new media. While a flow of new tech is inevitable, there is always room for more invention and creativity. I had a similar debate on music design and digital shifting its design platform. Times are a changing....
2009-10-27 14:40:32
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