I spent some time and wrote up my thoughts on covers—in Zoomii and in
catalogs—more fully on my blog.
http://www.librarything.com/thingology/2008/06/zoomii-book-covers-physicality-and.php
> I question how much covers are even used for recognition in a catalog
> context. First of all, searching an online catalog will never like
> browsing bookshelves. You can scan thousands of books on a shelf in
> seconds, but good luck doing that on a computer screen that is smaller
> by a few orders of magnitude.
The problem here is that as a general principle: You're not smarter
than Amazon. (I don't mean you personally, Kyle.) Amazon is not a
small bookstore, but far larger than any library, so by your reasoning
it should have even fewer covers than a library. And Amazon and other
ecommerce sites do *exhaustive* testing. They do A/B tests all the
time. Make a cover smaller—do sales go up or down? Make it larger—up
or down? Round and round.
Amazon knows what works. And what works selling a book ought to have
some relationship to what works browsing it.
Libraries differ only in the margins. Notably libraries are
handicapped insofar as their books lack actual covers, so there's
something of a disjunct between virtual and real. I don't think
libraries are full of textual learners, and Amazon filled with visual
ones. Rather, I think librarians tend to disdain covers because they
are usually on the far end of the visual/textual divide. Also, covers
cost libraries.
Tim
Received on Thu Jun 26 2008 - 10:33:41 EDT