Sometimes (Ever judge a book by it's cover?)

Member Name: defiler

Product:	Ever judge a book by it's cover?
Date:	22/05/01 (39 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Can enhance overall enjoyment of a book, Looks good

Disadvantages: You can miss out on books with a great story but poor cover, They can never compensate for a poor story

The cover of a book can play an important part in not only how well the book sells but how much some people will enjoy it, to me it has become less important in recent years as I have tended to read more and more books based on recommendations rather than actually picking them from the shop myself but I still feel it is important.

--Importance Of The Cover--
Some books are simply known by the type of covers they have, Discworld books for example can be easily recognised by the artwork on the front and the style of this really manages to add something to the book that fans can associate with the series. The cover can enhance your enjoyment of a book if it's great but it can never compensate for a bad story once you start reading.

--Book shops--
Sometimes you can see a book that looks really tatty and that I would never want to own, othertimes you can see an old copy of a book and find that it has a personal touch that you would never find with any book from a regular bookshop. Sometimes you see a new book with a cover that just somehow draws you to it. All these factor into your initial impression of a book.

If you are looking through second-hand books you will often come across things you have never heard of, as these books tend to be ones that you can either buy then or risk never seeing again unless you remember the title decisions tend to have to be taken very quickly, as such I find that the cover plays an important part in reaching the decision.

While I always find out what the book is about too, it would be impossible to read every single cover of every single book in many bookshops and as such most initial reads tend to be based purely on the cover and (to a much smaller extent) the title. A good cover will draw you to a book and even if the description sounds slightly different to how you imagined it you will probably think more of it than a book with a poorer cover.

--Online Ordering--
Order
ing online means the cover plays less of a part in your decision, while you often get to see an image of the book this isn't the same as seeing a book cover in person and as such whenever I order online it is almost always going to be based far more on the descriptions and opinions of the book than what the cover looks like.

--Recommendations--
If someone recommends a book to me and keeps mentioning it it will often make me want to read it and not care about what the book looks like, how long it is or anything else, in these situations I would again say that the cover of a book plays much less of a part in your decision to buy.

--Starting to read a book--
I find that books can often sit on my shelf for a while, after I finish a book and am ready to start another I will look at my shelf of unread books and decide which one to read, a good cover in these cases will often draw it to me and inspire me to read it. While a good cover can't beat a favourite author or other factors it can certainly inspire you to read one book over another and as such books with unimpressive covers can often sit on my shelf far longer than ones that stand out.

--Reading the book itself--
Once I actually get into the story itself the cover tends to be important to me, if the story is interesting enough to draw me into it I don't care what the cover looks like as I have an image in my mind of the world inside the book and as such find the cover can often spoil my own view of it, if it shows a main character in the book for example it might not show them as I imagined and as such I tend not to pay it too much attention.

---Conclusion---
If you are in a bookshop with no idea of what you are ordering one of the most important factors tends to be the cover as the book, it would never make me buy a book that I didn't really like the sound of but it can certainly interest me enough to at least read about the book. I am certain t
hat I will have missed out on a large number of books simply because of a poor cover, this is a shame really and it is annoying in many ways that people will miss out on books that they would otherwise have really enjoyed.

As I order more and more based on previous purchases, recommendations (both from friends and opinions) and order online more the cover becomes much less important to me compared to if I was buying from a bookshop or second-hand, as such I personally feel that it will play a smaller part in my decision to buy as time goes on.

Summary: