Coverless ebooks
Via a link in this instalment of The Convivial Sociert to Home Screens and thence to more of the author, Drew Austin at Kneeling Bus.
Far more than a container or shell for content, the cover is an interface between that content and human society, the intermediate layer that positions information in the world.
The essay puts its thumb on a sense of disquiet I’ve had for some time but not been able to adequately express, most recently twinged by opening a new book on my Kindle.
It ‘helpfully’ started me off at the beginning of first chapter. As I always do, I paged back to the ‘cover’ and began again: looking for clues in the cover art, reading the front matter (partly for context, partly as a way of creating punctuation between ‘content’), bemoaning the lack of chapter names in the table of contents, pondering the obscurity of the dedications … and discovered that I had been shortchanged by the Kindle’s certainty that I need focus only on the ‘content’: there was a prologue!
Had I relied on the Kindle’s sense of what was important and not begun at the very beginning, I would have missed a large amount of context and place-setting.
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