By Jimmy Baracia
I debated where exactly to go with this. First, I contemplated arguing that the book is always better, but we all know that already. Unless, of course, you happen to be a movie fanatic — in which case you are wrong (sorry, not sorry).
Then I thought about my bookish pet peeves: dog-eared pages, unrealistic plot twists or poorly done cliffhangers, overly verbose authors, stickers on the cover (especially if they’re impossible to peel off), or when writers have really bad editors so their book is just a concoction of a million and one mistakes. (I’m looking at you, Stephanie Meyer.)
Then it hit me: my biggest pet peeve.
I was reading “Ready Player One” just before I came back to campus and thought it was a phenomenal book and definitely worth the read. I was taking note of that on Goodreads when I realized something literally catastrophic. The cover.
On Goodreads, the cover is sleek and simple: a warm vermillion with bright yellow words detailing the title and the author: “Ready Player One” by Ernest Cline. Intertwined were two minor video game references, which were the little pixelated character (presumably our protagonist, Wade Watts) and a pixelated key, in reference to the Easter egg hunt that comprises the majority of the novel’s plot.
However, the book that I held in my hand bore a clip taken from the movie. Wade Watts is climbing a ladder looking out at “the stacks,” which is the place where he grew up. The original, simplistic yet sleek cover that represented the story was replaced with a snapshot of the 2018 film.
Why do we do this? Why do we take perfectly fine covers and replace them with boring and unrepresentative clips of their subpar films to draw in an audience and bang a few extra bucks for the producers and directors who transferred the book to (dare I say) a boring film?
This isn’t just in reference to “Ready Player One.” In fact, I have seen it done for so many books that I am beginning to lose count: “Percy Jackson,” “The Hobbit,” “The Lord of the Rings,” “Twilight” (I know I made a dig at you earlier Stephanie Meyer and I am so sorry), “The Giver,” and the list goes on… and on… and on.
I find each of these examples to be a failure. Not only will I not watch the movie, I will not buy that book because it is a disgrace to my bookshelf when compared to the other covers that are aesthetically pleasing.
Don’t get me wrong, I am all for a new cover design, especially if the book is wildly successful. However, it is vital that the new cover be more appealing to the eye than the original, so that readers want to spend more money on this new cover.
I don’t spend money just to spend money… I am a broke college student!
If I have a copy of “The Hobbit” at home –let’s say this copy has the simple cover bearing mountains and the red sun – I will not, under any circumstances, ever buy myself a copy of the novel where the cover is a snapshot of the film where Bilbo Baggins is leaving his Hobbit hole. And I am quite ashamed to admit that the copies of “The Hobbit” and “The Lord of the Rings” that I bought have a snapshot of the film as their cover… please, forgive me. I was in elementary school.
Maybe I am just harping on the details, but I seriously can’t help but wonder why we do this. Does it increase views of the film? Sales of the book? Please just let us readers have one thing. You get the rights to make a poor adaptation of our favorite novels, let us at least keep the original cover of our book.
Can we just eliminate the film-adapted book covers entirely? Leave me in peace with my perfectly fine book cover that does not need to be adapted to represent a film that poorly represents the book to begin with.
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