Thx for sharing!

Quoting from the original post:

when I want a new book I don’t pull out my phone, I walk down the street to the used book store.

So do I (only, it’s a little further away which makes for a nice walk too). It’s part of the fun, at least for me.

Also, I don’t like being tracked while I read and I want fully own the books I buy (I don’t want anyone to be able to delete or edit them, and I want the freedom to sell or to give away what I own, without any DRM/corporation trying to prevent me from doing that).

All of my favorite used book stores are located in old buildings that have lots of nooks and crannies. It’s this fractal approach to book layout that I think encourages exploration into areas you wouldn’t explicitly seek out otherwise.

100%. As can be speaking with the owner, employees, or even another customers you happen to meet in the same dusty corner of the shop. And as can help an odd cover color, or very different dimensions: they’ll mechanically grab my attention and I’m much more likely to at least glance at the author’s name and at its title.

That being said, I had a look to this interesting experiment (the technical explanations I did read are way too technical for non-geek me, hope that’s fine. Also I’m not sure to understand the way various genres are being grouped in clusters, or not grouped).

My first reaction was: where do I start? My second one was: Covers? Why should I care about them?

Then, I started looking around and I noticed a few things:

• It was not a surprise for me but still it was glaringly obvious: a lot of the books I had zero interest in them.
• Depending the genre, it’s also obvious how similar looking covers can be or, if I understand the experiment right, I should say how similar looking the covers can be for those books in that genre people liked most?

Which leads me to the question: why would they so similar (depending the genre, others not so much)? Is this because they are better covers that attract more people, hence the book wrapped inside that cover gets more likes? Or is it because readers in that genre are more afraid to read stuff that dares/tries to look different? So, instead of constantly trying and experimenting to be different, everyone concerned by making covers would be doing a very similar type of covers, using the same codes? Which could be sad (for the reader even more so than for the cover artist) because, you know, one is supposed to not judge a book by its cover ;)

On a more personal level, I also noticed that I could not be bothered when there was too many similar looking covers. They dissolved into a messy blob I could not care about. It’s probably related to the fact that I don’t wish to waste my time trying to identify any specific book within too many similar looking books. If they can’t quickly be distinguished and if I can’t search for a title or the author I simply stop caring.

Could that be a generational thing? I mean, I’m in my 50s and, even though I’ve always been an avid SF reader who like a nice cover, I don’t give the slightest fuck about them either. I mean, even for SF I won’t buy a book because of its cover and SF is but a small subset of my reading habits. Just wondering.