If you were to judge your favorite book by its cover, would you still read it?

My favorite book is “What Dreams May Come” by Richard Matheson. The cover art for the book is muted and features a man standing before a doorway in the sky. The words, the art, it’s hard for me to answer this prompt because I’ve read this book and I know I love it. I think that it would engage me even if I had never read it before. It would be better to judge a book I haven’t read and then read it and see if the judgement of the cover matched the experience.

I will say that a book that I saw by the cover, which was George Nader’s Chrome did intrigue me and I judged the book by the cover, at least positively and after I read it I was rewarded with a great experience. So in that case, judging a book by it’s cover, even if it wasn’t my favorite worked out for the best.

There are book covers that, lets face it, are awful. If I had to judge the Wheel of TIme series by it’s cover art I would just yawn myself to sleep. I wouldn’t be interested in any of it because I’d think it was a time travel story told by steampunk amish. Thankfully I was exposed to the books before I got a look at the covers and found myself loving the series despite it’s rather lame cover art.

I hate that books sell by their shiny cover art and not as much by their merits. Perhaps that’s something that eBooks can address as those, like the ones gathered from Project Gutenberg lack cover art, letting the text stand on it’s own for good or ill.