Judging a Book by its Cover Part 2

Cover 1

Cover 2

Cover 3

Cover 4 and Final

It appears that the subject of covers of e-books is on everybody's mind recently. Not least on my because I keep redesigning my own e-book cover.

In lieu of the fact that I'm no designer, I've taken inspiration from an excellent essay on the subject of book covers from Craig Mod
http://craigmod.com/journal/hack_the_cover/

Judge a book by its cover

The hoary old adage - "don't judge a book by its cover"- is a great piece of advice but one that's very hard to follow when more so than ever we have less time than ever to to make our decisions. Having a leisurely browse through the leafs of the pages in a book shop is an almost forgotten pleasure. Today's book browsing is more likely to be done from a computer screen when being distracted by incoming e-mails or Facebook conversations.

So now, we have to punch harder and come up with punchier titles and better graphics to convey the message in even less time.

As the Crow Dies can be bought here.

Where do Words Come From?

Ever wondered where the words you use come from? Etymology is a fascinating subject, but if you just have a passing interesting and not the will to go wading through  Douglas Harper’s wonderful online dictionary of etymology  its worth looking at a new project from Ideas Illustrated http://ideasillustrated.com/blog/2012/04/01/visualizing-english-word-origins/.

Here, the author has a selection of quotes which are highlighted in different colours to indicate where they derive from.

Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.

This is a surprisingly complex Monty Python quote where the colors represent Old English (pink), Middle English (red), Anglo-French (orange), Old French (light orange), Middle French (pale orange), and Classical and Medieval Latin (both yellow). I suspect that both the complexity and variety of word sources is intentional — standing in humorous contrast to the appearance of the speaker.