Why do modern book covers suck?

[retiredbiker]

Born in the 40s, I grew up with all those classic pulp and paperback covers, and yes, in the 60s and 70s especially, they sold me a lot of books with those great covers.

Now my old eyes have me stuck with ebooks, but I bring the covers back -- I love to find some of the old classics, mystery & scifi, that I haven't read or would like to re-read. I edit just about every book I get to suit my vision needs. And while I'm at it, I find the old covers and put them in the book. I've got literally hundreds of books with an "alt covers" file. And some of them, like Philip K. Dick, seem to have more covers than text sometimes.

[Tarana]

New covers on old books is often due to the loss of control of the cover image. Copyright rights have reverted not just to authors after 35 years. I believe that law includes covers which were separate from the book (unlike illustrations within a book). In many cases, covers were work-for-hire, so owned by the publisher. Now the author is republishing elsewhere, but the cover didn't come along with the rights.

[ownedbycats]

Originally Posted by Tarana

New covers on old books is often due to the loss of control of the cover image. Copyright rights have reverted not just to authors after 35 years. I believe that law includes covers which were separate from the book (unlike illustrations within a book). In many cases, covers were work-for-hire, so owned by the publisher. Now the author is republishing elsewhere, but the cover didn't come along with the rights.

I've seen so many books with beautiful painted covers replaced with crappy stock photos for this reason.

[graycyn]

Originally Posted by Tarana

New covers on old books is often due to the loss of control of the cover image. Copyright rights have reverted not just to authors after 35 years. I believe that law includes covers which were separate from the book (unlike illustrations within a book). In many cases, covers were work-for-hire, so owned by the publisher. Now the author is republishing elsewhere, but the cover didn't come along with the rights.

If a book is really old, it may not be just rights control, it might involve actually FINDING a nice condition cover to scan if one had the rights. Which often isn't easy for older, out-of-print titles. Nor cheap if a title is scarce.

At any rate, it's sad, because often, the old covers were lovely and create that certain nostalgia about a title. So I too wish more of the old art could be attached to new ebooks. But it's not likely to happen very often in today's world.

[meeera]

And some modern covers are fantastic. I really like the cover of N.K. Jemisin's The Cities We Became, for example, or P. Djèlí Clark's A Master of Djinn, or Sorrowland (Rivers Solomon). Or any cover by Kathleen Jennings, but especially Flyaway. Okorafor's Lagoon. The art on Ada Palmer's and Arkady Martine's covers and the Murderbot books, which are definitely better in person. Even the perhaps more workmanlike covers of the James S.A. Corey and Adrian Tchaikovsky and Cixin Liu books are pretty good, I think, a modern take on classic SF covers telling you the books do what they say on the tin.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Aleron Ives

At least Standard E-Books uses public-domain artwork for covers, rather than random geometric patterns...

It's just a shame their code is a mess.

[Uncle Robin]

Originally Posted by meeera

And some modern covers are fantastic. I really like the cover of N.K. Jemisin's The Cities We Became, for example, or P. Djèlí Clark's A Master of Djinn, or Sorrowland (Rivers Solomon). Or any cover by Kathleen Jennings, but especially Flyaway. Okorafor's Lagoon. The art on Ada Palmer's and Arkady Martine's covers and the Murderbot books, which are definitely better in person. Even the perhaps more workmanlike covers of the James S.A. Corey and Adrian Tchaikovsky and Cixin Liu books are pretty good, I think, a modern take on classic SF covers telling you the books do what they say on the tin.

Thanks for mentioning hers, I love them. Many of Aliette de Bodard's too

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by Cactus Chef

I wanted to make it clear that it wasn't just a "things were better in my day" post, because I was born in the late 80's and I feel like the trend was already turning towards the generic by the time I was reading books. I genuinely think the older covers looked more interesting.

Maybe. But to be honest, almost all the old Neuromancer covers were ugly. I also dislike science fiction covers that just show a spaceship.

Some of my favorite covers were the Arthur C. Clarke covers from the mid-80's. Those were classy.

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by graycyn

...I too wish more of the old art could be attached to new ebooks. But it's not likely to happen very often in today's world.

It's called Calibre and a good image editor (on Windows, I like the free Paint.NET). You can add whatever cover you want. I love the lurid old '80's horror covers. Thankfully, many of those authors have put out ebooks. But the new covers range from dull to embarrassing.

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by meeera

And some modern covers are fantastic. I really like the cover of N.K. Jemisin's The Cities We Became, for example, or P. Djèlí Clark's A Master of Djinn, or Sorrowland (Rivers Solomon). Or any cover by Kathleen Jennings, but especially Flyaway. Okorafor's Lagoon. The art on Ada Palmer's and Arkady Martine's covers and the Murderbot books, which are definitely better in person. Even the perhaps more workmanlike covers of the James S.A. Corey and Adrian Tchaikovsky and Cixin Liu books are pretty good, I think, a modern take on classic SF covers telling you the books do what they say on the tin.

I really like the cover for Children of Blood and Bone (more than I liked the book, as it turns out).

[meeera]

Originally Posted by ZodWallop

I really like the cover for Children of Blood and Bone (more than I liked the book, as it turns out).

I haven't read that yet, but you're right, the cover is very striking. The Binti covers are great, too.

[allanahk]

I agree that many modern book covers are overly simplistic with blocky colours and tend to be fairly boring and unrelated to the book contents. On the other hand, some older book covers are clearly meant to be displayed in colour and appear as an unfortunate hodgepodge of grey on an ereader screen.

I generally don't buy physical books anymore, and for ebooks I enjoy having the book cover displayed as a screensaver on my kobo, so a nice cover is relatively important.

If I get an ebook with a horrific cover I like using the Penguin Classics Cover Generator to create a new cover and update the ebook in Calibre (where the generated image is solely for my personal use of course).

For example, I didn't like any of the covers available for Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges so I made my own with a quickly googled image of a maze. Not particularly inventive, but considering it only took about 1 min total to make then it's not bad.

[teamug]

Generally the trend for many new books (not re-releases of older ones) are covers with very simple art, usually quite colorful, and the title in written huge letters all over the covers. I've read somewhere that this is due to e-commerce; no matter if you buy the print version or ebook version, you are most likely going to be seeing the cover by scrolling an online list of very small thumbnails of the covers, so the title needs to be readable at that small size.

I like many modern covers, but some are just lazy. A simple cover is okay, but it needs to not look like you paid someone on Fiverr $1 to do it.

The old style scifi covers appeal to me, a young person, on account of their retro charm, but I have no problem at all understanding why covers for new books don't look that way anymore.

[Quoth]

The author is in biggest letters, series in next biggest and maybe title smaller than "plaudits" if the author is well known.

[Fiat_Lux]

Originally Posted by ZodWallop

It's called Calibre and a good image editor (on Windows, I like the free Paint.NET). You can add whatever cover you want. I love the lurid old '80's horror covers. Thankfully, many of those authors have put out ebooks. But the new covers range from dull to embarrassing.

A couple of Art Museums have publicly released low-res images of most of their collection, with the idea that individuals and groups will purchase high-res images to use for their marketing.

Those low res images are suitable for ebook covers, albeit probably not a good idea to share them with third parties.