Week 9 : Exercise 3 : Thing 1 - Judging eBooks by their Covers

Today's theme is judging by covers.

When I first looked through the library of titles at NetLibrary, the first thing that struck me was that I wasn't immediately inspired to click on any of the books. Maybe we've been a bit spoilt with all of these flash LibraryThing etc sites, that access images from elsewhere on the net to create their covers, but the first book that I decided to peek into was also the first one with a cover image.

There could be a couple of reasons for the lack of covers - the nature of eBooks is often that copyright has expired on the book, so it is able to be transcribed without any legal ramifications. These books are therefore often older texts, which may never have had any distinctive cover. Or, the site could just be in the process of adding these now.

Just to put my choice into perspective - the book that I did choose by cover, actually turned out to be the least interesting of those I looked at!

Content wise, I've never been a fan of reading eBooks on a computer. Sometimes I might do it if I'm researching a topic, but that's because I can use search tools to skip large chunks of text. When reading a book - it's just not comfortable. However... using the search function, I realised that I could search by subject for short stories that might possibly be short enough to hold my attention without my eyes turning square.

In the end, this method produced some titles I may go back to. The whole process of finding books and adding to favourites was completely intuitive and easy, and while I'm not keen on reading a whole book in this format - I did also find some good ones that I'd like to read, if only they weren't so long!!!