Don't Judge A Book By The Cover This statement is one of the first that many of us learned in school, so obviously true that explanation was not really necessary. You can't really tell what is in a book by looking at the cover, thus millions of dollars are spent every week on thousands of book reviews from the New York Times, The Times of London, The Times of India, and literally tens of thousands of other newspapers around the world. Therefore, the question looms large as to why so many people who will label themselves as book lovers actually comment more on the way that books look than on the books' actual content? To Read, Or Not To Read, That Is The Question So many of the comments from insiders have ONLY to do with the forms, layouts, fonts, bindings, paper, cataloging information, margination, pagination, hyphenation and linguistic orthography, without any looks or mentions at the actual content of the books that one begins really to wonder if they have actually read the book at all, rather than big efforts to look at the book without actually managing to read it. This would be tatamount to "Car and Driver" reporting on cars without actually driving them. They would talk about the great paint job, how the low profile tires, and low profile body work together to create a specific image, how an interior was designed to work more spaciously than the actual numbers of cubic feet available to each passenger, the window visibility, and a host of other items such as the rich Corinthian leather upholstery, but without doing some serious driving, there is no way to tell if an automobile is real, it could just be a mock up that can't move. If a book fails to move the reader, it has failed as a book in just a similar manner as if a car fails to move its passengers. All of this is, of course, totally academic if you don't read books. The Appearance Of Books As Compared To The Appearance Of Persons We've all been told "The clothes don't make the person," but we still live in a society in which a major portion of the economy are created in a effort to make people judge others by their appearance. Even if you totally discount the Hollywood and haute couture fashion, a billion people spend additional thousands of dollars to wear things that create the illusion they want to project, rather than being what they actually are, on the surface, as well as inside. The arguments presented against books in similar conversations are an example of exactly the same thing, only worse, as in these cases they have not addressed the content of the books at all. Here is a little list of the qualities of books compared to persons: Persons Books Hair Color Spine Appearance Hair Style Title Height/Weight Length/Weight Hair Length Page Size Eye Color Binding Color Beauty Paper Quality Breeding Catalog Data Manicure Page Layout Nail Polish Font Selection Footwear Binding Material Language Hyphenation Accent Orthography Eyewear Font Size Skin Tone Paper Color/Finish Believe it or not, most of the comments received in the conversations about these books concentrate on the elements on this list and not on the actual contents of the books. If a similar conversation were to take place about persons we know, a conclusion would quickly be made that observations were superficial-- nothing to do with the actual person, just as the conversations about the books here have nothing to do with the substantive material. Psychologists and psychiatrists have a name for this fixation on some secondary characteristics as opposed the the primary: It is called "fetishism." Of course, with the books under discussion, there is nothing stopping anyone from choosing the exact appearance they find most attractive. Anyone who complains is obviously just to lazy to made an adjustment.