Book through Thursday – Cover-up

This week’s question comes from Julie, who asks:

While acknowledging that we can’t judge books by their covers, how much does the design of a book affect your reading enjoyment? Hardcover vs. softcover? Trade paperback vs. mass market paperback? Font? Illustrations? Etc.?

Now that I’m not reading regular books anymore I don’t have to worry about covers and them ruining or enchancing my enjoyment. I’m a tradepaperback girl at heart still though. It’s the best of both worlds and the font size is usually so much easier for me to read. Font size or lack of a good readable font size has been the bane of my reading pleasure for a while now. I’m legally blind, so at first I believed that my problems reading a lot of fonts and font sizes in many of the books I loved were just my eye’s not being what they were. I found out after questioning many other readers I know that this is not the cause 98% of the time. Publishers are trying to save costs and I hope trees by using smaller size fonts. This is a problem for me and probably a lot of other people out there who love to read and read till we have major eye strain induced headaches. Now that I have my Cybook Gen 3 e-book reader I am in heaven I can put the font to the font I want, I can enbold the print as well as enlarge it!! Plus it’s just slightly smaller than my favourite size of book, the trade paperback. I love the trade paperbacks because they are so much easier to read lying in bed than hardbacks with the usually larger fonts and now I have everything I want minus the dusty books collecting even more around my house. Now only if I could get all the books I, my partner and daughter own in txt, html or mobipocket format without paying yet again for a copy of the books we have!!

As for picking books by their covers, brighter and/or shiny covers get my attention  especially if there are dragons; however it only gets me to read the back cover or the inner jacket to really decide if I’m going to read that book or not.  I pick up books with ugly looking or boring covers, but just not as fast as the ones that I’m drawn to like a magpie to shiny!