Slashdot Mirror
New Site Mocks Bad Artwork On Ebook Covers
An anonymous reader writes A British newspaper is celebrating "the world's worst ebook artwork", as discovered by the creator of a new Tumblr feed. 'It's the hubris of it that people get a kick out of — the devil-may-care attitude of an author who, with zero arts training, says to themselves: "How hard can it be?" Two different authors simply cut-and-pasted smaller images over a background showing the planets, according to one Kindle blog, which notes that one author actually pasted eyes and lips onto the planets, creating an inadvertently creepy montage. But the site's creator tells the newspaper that it's ultimately meant to be an affectionate tribute to their rejection of the mundane and appreciating each creative and beautiful mess.
I've seen worse artwork (or simply no artwork whatsoever) on e-books from reputable authors and publishers. Perhaps because they didn't have the rights to distribute the original artwork of the print version electronically, they just slapped on something they had lying around.
At least most of them have stopped charging more for electronic versions of a book... And they even sell them outside the US now.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Mockery on the Internet. This is a dark day indeed!
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
WTF is wrong with /.? Just close shop already!
The only time I see the cover for any e-book that I read is when I am on Amazon selecting a new book. Even then, I skip over the cover to the story summary and the reviews. Opening a book on my e-reader (Kindle) takes me to the first page in the first chapter. The covers are displayed on the home screen, but I only go there to open a new book.
What would be nice, assuming that Amazon ever comes out with a color e-ink reader, is if the Kindle showed the cover of the book that you are reading on the display when you shut it off. They probably don't do it today because the e-ink screen is grey-scale and the covers wouldn't look all that appealing.
Physical books required interesting graphic art to catch the eye of a book browser and to differentiate itself. Covers are much less important for e-books.
Cover design is hard, and most people do judge books by the cover. These books have content that is likely reflected by their covers pretty well, so in that sense I'd say most of them are pretty good.
The one a few pages in about the guy who's annoyed is really quite good: blunt, angry, simple. Since that's what the book looks to be like, how can the cover be bad?
For my book (http://www.amazon.com/Darwins-Theorem-TJ-Radcliffe-ebook/dp/B00KBH5O8K/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1400044028&sr=1-1&keywords=darwin%27s+theorem) one of my first readers was an artist, so I hired her to do the cover art. It captures a lot of things about the book, and it's beautiful on its own, so it's a win.
But I'm sure a purist would find a million things wrong with it, from the ambiguities of the image to my choice of font (not papyrus or comic sans, but any font can be mocked if you work at it hard enough) to the choice of colours (too blue, not enough contrast) to the overall look (too cluttered, too busy)... and so on.
Still, my hope was to keep it reasonably low on the mockability scale, and while it's fun to mock stuff, but I have a depressing feeling that many of these mocked books are selling a lot better than a lot of less-mockable stuff. So maybe I should replace my cover with unicorns and rainbows and leather-clad half-dressed bikers to see if that boosts sales...
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
Darwin's Theorem. A story about a guy's love for a giant flying jellyfish. Spoiler: The jellyfish stings prove fatal, but not before he makes the jellyfish pregnant. The sequel is called Darwin's Theorem II: Jellybaby.
Those were my favorites. It sort of makes me miss the finely crafted writing you find inherent in slash fanfic.
The artwork matched the title perfectly.
The artwork for Now That I'm a Ghost I'm Gay matched as well.