As publishers are seeing print sales slide as eBook sales grow, some are looking at new ways to give value to print book. The latest trend is to make beautiful designs and textured covers that can’t be replaced digitally.
Jay-Z, Haruki Murakami and Stephen King all have new books out in which their publishers went the extra mile with packaging.
The New York Times reports: “A new novel by Stephen King about the Kennedy assassination, ’11/22/63,’ has an intricate book jacket and, unusual for fiction, photographs inside. The paperback edition of Jay-Z’s memoir ‘Decoded’ features a shiny gold Rorschach on the cover, and in March the front of “The Song of Achilles” by Madeline Miller will bear an embossed helmet sculpted with punctures, cracks and texture, giving the image a 3-D effect.”
Over at eBookNewser, we compared the packaging trend to the music industry: “The idea is to create a product that is beautifully designed that fans will want to own. Often, these extensive boxsets and heavy vinyl packages, come with a code to download the album for free for those who purchase it. Let’s face it, even those people who will shell out more money to buy a 180 gram vinyl version of an album, are probably going to actually be listening to MP3s more often.”