Why no color covers for ebooks?
By Paul Biba
Jane, over at Dear Author, has a good post on the failure of publishers to provide color covers on their ebooks. Even if you are reading on a Kindle or a Sony Reader, both have a grey scale level that would allow a decent reproduction of a real book cover:
For some reason, many print publishers have this belief that readers of ebooks don’t want the color cover that print readers get. Not only do readers of ebooks get shafted on the color cover, they don’t get back cover copy or a stepback picture. Digital consumers like pictures too.
I’ve heard that the reason that publishers aren’t including the color cover copy is because the digital readers are black and white. Given that 50% of consumers of digital are reading from a laptop and a significant portion are using the iPhone or iTouch, that excuse simply doesn’t fly. When I first started buying ebooks, there were no commercial readers on the market. It was either buying an eBookwise on the secondary market (production had been halted on those devices) or reading on my laptop. I read on my laptop.
The odd thing is that sometimes you get color covers from some publishers and other times you do not. It’s like there is no quality control in the generation of an ebook. Take, for example, the Jill Sorenson book. Random House won’t provide the color cover, but it does provide two other images that are in the paper book:
September 27th, 2009 at 12:02 pm
Paul writes:
> It’s like there is no quality control in the generation of an ebook.
I’ve been finding worse examples than that of lack of quality control. My copy of “The Confusion” by Neal Stephenson from “William Morrow, An Imprint of Harper Collins Publishers” has the German double s (ß) encoded wrong, so it comes out looking like an accented e (é). It makes reading scenes that take place in a Schloß difficult.
September 27th, 2009 at 3:26 pm
We provide a color cover for every eBook (same cover as print book). This is for a bix six publisher…
September 27th, 2009 at 8:33 pm
It’s just another sign of how little actual thought has been spent on e-books by traditional publishers.
September 28th, 2009 at 6:58 am
I wonder if it is possible that there are rights issues. Also: a separate design for a $30 hardback and a $10 ebook leads to possibly convincing buyers that the content of the hardback is somehow ‘better.’ Remember the old days of the 1950s when cheap paperback editions screamed with lurid pulpy covers, and hardbound editions were restrained and highbrow?
Another consideration beyond color/grayscale is one of size. The level of detail we can distinguish on a trade paperback cover is considerably more than the thumbnail that shows up on any website ebook store.
Still: designing a separate cover must mean an extra expense. Seems as though publishers would be looking for any way to cut costs these days. And a consistent cover design and look across all the editions sells books.
September 28th, 2009 at 4:57 pm
We provide a color cover for every book that we submit. The problem is that when publishers use a service bureau through their distributor, they get to submit one pdf. That pdf is then taken by the bureau and reformatted for all the various devices. So far the three we have worked with all save for the “lowest common denominator” and will not work up various files of various configurations for different platforms.
So it’s one file in and it’s a one-size-fits-all file that the distributor pushes out to all the devices and device stores.
They all say this will be changing soon, but it sure isn’t soon enough.
October 1st, 2009 at 10:48 am
Most publishers do not have the digital rights to the cover art of the title – so they just strip the cover image and use the title page as the cover. Other publishers create a generic cover and use that (these tend to be in color). Actual cover images ARE used for marketing reasons though.