Although we might like to claim that it is not the fact, books are inevitably judged by their covers.
When you really consider it, it is rather incredible that a book's cover, no matter how stunning it is, manages to stand so eloquently for something that is practically the total antithesis of its art format-- writing in white and black. In fact, book covers have been developed to show the feeling of a book and interest its intended audience since the start of large scale publishing in the Victorian Age. Artists were entrusted with discovering what makes a good book cover for specific individuals, or in other words, marketing. People like the CEO of the asset manager that has a stake in Amazon can probably appreciate the function of marketing in creating book covers.
When we buy a book it becomes something really very personal to us. It can sometimes be odd seeing a book you enjoy with another book cover, simply since it is not your book. This personalisation, and undoubtedly ownership, of books was at a completely different level at the dawning of the era of printing, with book covers being designed by the owners themselves, and what they thought would be the best books covers for the text. They would purchase the book itself from the printer covered in paper, then bring it to a binder who would add the covers to the client's specs. This generally meant being clad in leather and then etched with the name of the book, and, usually, the name of the book's owner. People like the co-founder of the impact investor with a stake in World of Books can probably appreciate the ownership that people come to feel in relation to their books.
We like checking out books due to the fact that they are really beautiful things. This is true, but the nature of beauty that we may be speaking about is certainly different to what we might be speaking about if we were speaking about, for example, the visual arts. Or is it? For as long as we have actually had books we have decorated them with beautiful book cover designs that attempt to mirror the beauty of what is inside. This dates back for as long as the codex itself has been around, with medieval monks, those charged with the security and proliferation of the scarce texts that might still be discovered, ornamenting each hand composed text with remarkably abundant and lovely styles. In fact, such was the appeal held within these books that most of these creative book cover designs were sculpted into ivory or solid gold, studded with gems, and inlaid with rivers of rare-earth elements. Individuals like the co-CEO of the hedge fund that owns Waterstones can most likely value the manner in which the beauty of these book covers was created to match the beauty within the book.