Musing Monday: Reading Cover to Cover

This week's Musing Monday question is:

"We all know the old adage about not judging a book by it’s cover, but just how much sway does a book cover have when it comes to your choice of book – whether buying or borrowing? Are there any books you’ve bought based on the cover alone?"

To answer the question: Book covers play into approximately 60% of the books that I decide to read. Here's how it breaks down:

If I'm in the book store, aimlessly browsing around, I'll admit that book covers are what catch my eye and get me to pick the book up. A snappy or intriguing title gets me to flip it over and check out the summary of the book, and some good copy on the back will sometimes be enough to get me to buy it (or to read the first couple of pages and get a feel to see if it's something I'll like). My last Friday Finds post boasted that four of seven (more than half) of the YA reads I picked up at the store last week were because the cover art got my attention.

I also posted of a review of a book, Younger, that wasn't that great (C Rating) that I originally picked up at the store because the cover had a cake on it and I was hungry at the time.

If I'm reading blogs that only have a picture of the book with a title and author listed, without a summary, then the cover does it for me. I'm way too lazy to go clicking through on every single book that's posted. (Note: Please, please, please, if you're reading this, just put at least one sentence about what the book's about... don't make me click through to Amazon or whereever to get my summary. You already know the summary because you're aware of the book. Can we do this book bloggers?) That parenthetical plead being made, if it's a totally eye-catching cover (which can vary from moment to moment for me), then I'll click through and read the summary and reviews and what-not.

Examples of these types of blog posts are: the Teaser Tuesday meme on MizB's blog, Waiting on Wednesday at Alea's Pop Culture blog, Books to Pine for at The Story Sire, the Friday Finds meme on MizB's blog, and This Week in Books at Alea's Pop culture blog.

If I'm reading blogs that give a summary of the plot and a review, then cover art doesn't make a bit of difference to me.

To see a blog dedicated to book covers, check out the Book Covers blog. (There are tons of this kind of blog out there--comparing hard cover v. paperback, finding look-alike covers, etc.)