Books hold an extremely different position in the modern world than they did one and a half thousand years back, a thing you can distinguish the covers.
We are very lucky to reside in a period when we can just walk into a bookshop and pick a book that piques our fancy from the shelves. Ways we select a book is very much up for debate, however evaluating a book by its cover can be a vital part of that, as it has probably been thoroughly designed to appeal to our tastes (if it is a book we will enjoy naturally). Standardized book covers go back to the Victorian age, when early marketers and artists attempted to determine what makes a good book cover, producing beautiful fabric book covers for more refined literary works, and pulpy paperbacks for lower-brow works. A comparable system still runs today, as the founder of the hedge fund that owns Waterstones will probably understand.
They state that a home without books is like a space without windows. For those used to being surrounded by beautiful book cover designs that is absolutely correct; books add an actually essential, cosy sensation to a home. People have actually been embellishing their books since books were invented, their covers, which were, and still are, developed to secure the delicate pages within, covered with art designed to show the work within. The first book covers were embellished by monks in the middle ages, who would protect those specifically valuable, rare, handwritten works with detailed concepts made from carved ivory, frequently studding them with gemstones and precious metals. The care and richness given to their decoration reveals simply what treasures books were during that time, as the CEO of the asset manager with a stake in Amazon will probably appreciate.
There is something fantastic about creative book cover designs, but frequently the feel of a book is just as essential. Books that have leather covers, for example, always feel extremely unique, like something very old and really important. Leather book covers date back to the renaissance, when printing made books much less uncommon than during the middle ages when they had to be transcribed by hand, however the ability to read and own books was still restricted to a select few from the upper classes. At the time consumers did not buy their books whole, but collect them from the printers with a momentary joint and wrapped in paper, before taking them to be bound by professionals. This would almost always be in leather, etched with something basic, such as the title of the book, the author, and the initials of the owner. They need to have seemed like very essential, unique books indeed, as the co-founder of the impact investor with a stake in World of Books can most likely envision.