The physical book has proved more resilient than champions of electronic texts once predicted, but the overall trend is plain: with each passing year we are reading less from printed paper and more on phones, tablets, e-book readers, and computers. Whence my question: Do covers still have a place when the publications that they previously covered are becoming nothing more than digital bits?
In theory, one could suppose that not much would change. Yes, as books cease to be physical objects, covers are obviously no longer needed to protect them. But digital books could easily still sport a digitally reproduced cover. Indeed, given how recent phones and tablets enable zoomed scrutiny of images, it wouldn’t have been surprising, even, if the shift away from physical books had led to enhanced interest in covers.
But it hasn’t. On the contrary: in the transition to digital reading, covers are disappearing from view. On my Kindle, book covers survive only as small thumbnail icons, used as buttons to select a title for reading. Once a selection is made, I am plunged straight into the text, without ever seeing a full-screen reproduction of the cover. I can call up a full-screen view, to be sure, but I have to look for it, and this makes it entirely different from the cover of a physical book. Instead of a face that I see, naturally and inevitably, each time that I take a work in hand, the full-screen cover on the Kindle is a special option, a normally hidden facet that has to be actively sought out.
The digital covers of academic journals are even harder to find. Consider the case of East Asian Science, Technology, and Society (EASTS), a journal whose editors clearly care about expressive cover design. Those who browse the journal through Project Muse can, to be sure, call up full-screen reproductions of issue covers from the last nine years. But again, readers have to consciously seek out these views (calling them up requires clicking on a thumbnail icon), and the covers from the first four years (2007-2010) aren’t archived online at all. Still more critically, Project Muse isn’t the only, or even necessarily the main way in which researchers will search online for EASTS articles.
At Harvard, for instance, the default library search for EASTS goes through ProQuest, which calls up the table of contents of each issue, but reproduces no cover images at all, not even thumbnails. The same holds true if one is searching—in by far the most common situation—for a particular article. The Harvard engine will quickly track it down in EASTS (if that it is where it appeared), but will again offer no way to see the cover of the issue in it which it appeared—and indeed, no hint that a cover ever existed. Quietly and completely, in the transition to digital access, the expressive covers of EASTS have vanished, without a trace.
Does the vanishing of journal covers matter?
A good number of people must feel that it doesn’t—or it wouldn’t have happened. After all, nothing about the technology of digital reading requires covers to disappear. It wouldn’t have been hard to program search engines and journal aggregators to keep them visible, and the possibilities of digital enhancement could easily have been deployed, on the contrary, to increase their allure. If covers have vanished, it is because they have been allowed to vanish—because the architects of online access judged them inessential, and because readers have acquiesced by not protesting, or perhaps, not even noticing.
The truth is that attractive covers have always been eyed with some ambivalence. They are like attractive faces: we are immediately drawn to them, but the very immediacy of their appeal makes them slightly suspect. After all, why should we be moved to pick up a book or approach a stranger before we have even read a page or exchanged a single word? We are wary: experience has taught us that appearances can deceive. We know that people with beautiful faces are sometimes morally ugly, and that an enticing cover can adorn a dull and turgid monograph. Whence the proverbial admonitions: “Don’t judge people by their looks,” and its parallel, “Don’t judge a book by its cover.” Surface is not substance. What matters is not the container but the content. Not the face but the soul. Not the cover but the text.
For those who think thus, the vanishing of covers is no great loss.
But the idea of covers as mere surface is itself too superficial. Properly to assess the stakes in their loss, we must consider what covers do. And what they don’t.
What they don’t do is what articles do, and that is strive to mirror as faithfully as possible the thoughts in the minds of authors. The photograph below is typical of the kind of plate that is regularly found within articles. An author discussing steam locomotives, say, might include it to insure that readers envision exactly the model that she has in mind.
