Sunday, January 22, 2006

A Cover Flat In All Its Glory


An example of a coverflat.
Provided by Kate R.


This is an example of the typical cover flat. Most include not only the cover, the spine and the back copy, but also the bar code (along with ISBN) and price. Additionally Zebra has hole-punched the cover of Kate's cover to indicate that this is not from a whole book (therefore the cover cannot be ripped off and sent back as a strip, so that the bookstore can cheat the publisher out of profit). Not all cover flats include the hole, often the opposite side of the front cover half will include marketing information not found on the actual release.

2 comments:

Kate said...

I also sent this to you because I think it's interesting that there's only one indication that it's a historical.

I've seen at least one of those informative covers (print run, release date, previous titles etc) with a hole drilled in it.

Bookseller Chick said...

Really? Hmm. I almost never get them with the hole drilled in them. At least I don't think so. Now I'm going to have to look through my cover flat collection and see.

You're right about the only indication that it is a historical is on the spine. How verrrrry interesting. I would love to find out what was going on in Zebra's marketing/Design departments heads when they made that decision.