Emily Hill ’18, guest blogger
This week I wanted to talk about the process I went through for developing a cover for our eBook in the Winter Term class ENG 311 Publishing. I never really considered the importance of visual rhetoric before this assignment. Originally, I did research on books with the same topic. One of our textbooks for class, The Case for Books by Robert Darnton, really stood out to me, and I wanted to think of a way to incorporate an eBook theme into our cover.
I originally thought to do an iPad, but my project partner Tim suggested I shouldn’t do that after I had already used that idea for an infographic within the book. After much more brainstorming, I was finally inspired to put our title, subtitle, and author credit text on the eBook bookshelves.
If you refer to the image on the left, I originally just had the text, but then in class we discussed the concept of white space. White space is such an important element when it comes to design. After looking at this image without the book covers pictured below, I knew that something needed to be done. In addition, I needed to add some kind of color to the page.
Tim and I both brainstormed on how we could rhetorically appeal to our audience while staying relevant to the theme of the book. That is when we discovered the idea of creating our own eBook templates on the cover to fill the space. We purposely used books with different genres and areas of study to appeal to our intended audience of Elon undergraduate students. Our purpose for this decision was to show students that they can write and self publish about anything they are interested in.
In a chapter called “The Future of Books,” Duguid talks about the idea that anyone can steal other people’s information now that they have full access to it online. That is why Tim and I wanted to work hard in developing an original idea. It is interesting though, to consider his argument that since this idea was inspired by something previously created online, it can’t be completely original. The idea of eBooks filling shelves is a widely known concept and, therefore, isn’t completely original. This is a very controversial issue in the publishing industry nowadays.
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