I do think, however, that cover design is *changing* because of the digital platform. Now you have to account for the fact that some people (like me) will be seeing these covers in black and white on their kindles, and other folks will be seeing them as tiny thumbnails. So design elements are naturally changing to meet those needs. Is that bad? I think it’s just different.

(Also, I think it would be really cool if I had some ‘digital bookshelf’ online where I could go and browse through all the titles I own by cover art, kind of like you can flip through album covers in iTunes.)

I don’t quite get why cover images would be less important for ebooks than physical. The cover is there to incite interest and get the book sold; if that weren’t true, all physical books would have plain covers. When it comes to ebooks, images serve the same purpose. I’ll click on a link with an intriguing cover thumbnail over one with just text.

In Kidd’s TED talk, he addressed the idea that a cover is kind of a distillation of the essence of a book. I think one’s book collection reflects something of the reader, too, and that’s made visible to others through the packaging before any of the text can be read. Even in a digital age, I like the idea that someone snooping through my Kindle would form the same idea of me through the digital images as they would if I had all those books on physical shelves.