I did my PhD thesis on the way young adults (18-29 years) discover music in everyday life. CDs are not books, but my findings might offer some insights into the way book covers can be used. I found that CD covers were far more informative that what we might think. Most of the time, they are used to make a first selection when browsing a music store or library, the following step usually consisting in sampling the music and/or reading about it on the Web (note that a few participants even reported buying albums or borrowing them from the library only on the basis their cover!).
Although for some it was a way to quickly identify known items, several considered that an album cover tells a lot about the music it contains. Music genres come to be associated with a specific cover art style. Indie music albums, for instance, are often in cardboard jewel cases... There seemed to be a lot of sentimentality attached to the concept of cover art as well.
Cunningham, Reeves and Britland also came to the conclusion that music shopping was highly visual and that people can usually recognize the cover style of their favorite music genres. (Cunningham, S. J., Reeves, N., & Britland, M. (2003). An ethnographic study of music information seeking: implications for the design of a music digital library. Proceedings of the third ACM/IEEE-CS joint conference on Digital libraries).
Audrey
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Audrey Laplante
Chargée d'enseignement
École de bibliothéconomie et des sciences de l'information
Université de Montréal
Courriel : audrey.laplante_at_umontreal.ca
Received on Fri Jun 27 2008 - 09:34:55 EDT