Pelican Books — is reclaiming covers in ebooks

When covers are good, they’re good, but more often that not they tend to drive me nuts these days. I’m having a blast posting about the covers that annoy me and that grab me over here, but never once have I thought about ebook covers. I mean, they’re pretty much inconsequential to me when I look at my ebook library. They’re blurry, small and are just familiar enough to me to recognise before I click into the book.

Pelican Books, relaunched recently, is trying to change that.

 

 

When Pelican was relaunched, the focus was to make the ebook reading experience as close to a book in print as possible. Which I can understand — there are enough complaints about how the ebook will never be close to a book in print — and closing that divide in some form would make for more ebook readers.

And they’re going all out in making sure typefaces work online and in print, and the layout of their books will work with any screen size.

But ebook covers — do they matter? I mean, like I said above, they matter very little to me at least when it comes to reading on my iPhone or tablet. On a shelf, yes they’ll grab my attention or irritate me, but not in an ebook.

Pelican, though, wants the cover to be present through the book through title pages for each chapter — same font, typeface and colour as the cover. I think that makes sense for a non-fiction book, but can it really be translated to a novel? I can’t see how it would matter in a novel, in all honesty.

That said, the more I read about how much Pelican is doing to make sure their non-fiction titles have detailed non-text content, like maps for instance, and can even embed a video in the text, the more impressed I get about what they are doing.

…In the end, it is intriguing to imagine what they could do with a novel, isn’t it?

Check out the Pelican site here.