Hasta La Ideas

As the book industry struggles to come to grips with the challenges to print sales presented by ebooks, accelerated by the arrival on UK shores this week of Amazon’s Kindle, publishers are having to become increasingly inventive with the main selling feature available to them in the shops: the book cover.

Scholastic Press has released a wonderfully-covered version of Chris Wooding’s Young Adult novel Malice (a book about London teens who get trapped inside a nasty comic book). Witht the hardback version of the book out in the US this month, the new edition has a cover bearing a 3-D plastic figure and title, the brainchild of Alison Padley, Scholastic’s UK design manager.

Alison Padley’s ‘flat design’ for the 3D cover of Malice

Padley commissioned and art directed artist Dan Chernett’s comic book-style illustrations for the interior of the book and the cover, and coupled these with a 3-D moulding technique. “I thought when I initially saw it that the moulding would be great to use on a book cover at some point, since as far as I know that had never before been done.”

Using one of Chernett’s illustrations of Tall Jake, a character who transports the protagonists into the book’s fantasy world, she made a flat design and consulted with Claire Tagg, Scholastic’s production director. “There are five levels of depth in the mould,” Padley says. “So basically we considered what points in the artwork stand out most and went from there. As the printer worked, he sent us emails of the various stages.” Tagg comments that, even with the special cover, the UK version of Malice is still priced at the standard paperback rate.

Printer proofs of Malice’s moulded cover

An increasingly used technique for mainstream hardbacks is the printed laminated cover, which removes the need for a dustjacket. Pioneered a couple of years ago by independent publisher Canongate with Scarlett Thomas’ The End of Mr Y, the process is being used for Acts of Violence, debut author Ryan David Jahn’s forthcoming novel from Macmillan New Writing.

Will Atkins, Macmillan’s Editorial Director for Fiction says:

“PLC novels remain fairly unusual, and in the case of Acts of Violence this minimal, less fussy treatment matches the starkness of the cover image (something that’s emphasised by the blood red endpapers), which in turn reflects the spare-ness and immediacy of the writing. It’s also b-format – an unusual size for a hardback.”

Macmillan’s hope for Acts of Violence is that these design elements appeal to the book’s core readership, but are distinctive enough to seduce those attracted by strong design to pick it up off the shelves.

Picador’s new release, Dr Ragab’s Universal Language also lacks a dustjacket, and has gold foiling in addition to the print added straight to the cover. The cover for Acts of Violence was designed in-house by Stuart Wilson

But with the Kindle increasing its reach, Sony’s Reader series competing hard with Amazon and the unveiling yesterday of Barnes & Noble’s dual-screen Nook in the US (and its tie-in with Adobe), do innovative cover designs for mainstream novels really have any hope of stalling the mass adoption of ebooks?

Barnes & Noble’s Nook, released this week to compete with Amazon’s Kindle, has both an e-ink viewer and LCD touchscreen