The following two queries popped into my head on the drive to work this morning.
Q1 Why do hardback gamebooks not come with dustjackets? Nearly every other hardback I buy comes with a dustjacket.
Q2 If they hadn't been lumped into the grunge scene, would Soundgarden be remembered as the rockingest band to come out of the nineties? I think so.
An Overdue Apology
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First of all, I am not being compelled or forced to do this, at least not
by any external agent. This is all about acknowledging my mistake. When the
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Posts
Q1 Why do hardback gamebooks not come with dustjackets? Nearly every other hardback I buy comes with a dustjacket.
ReplyDeleteCould it be that they are similar to textbooks? I don't remember textbooks having dustjackets. maybe the publishers of gamebooks use textbook binding to save money. I', sure a dustjacket would add on a couple of bucks to the retail cost.
and about your no horses post. check out the Gor series. lots of ingo on reptilian mounts and giant hawks (Tarns)-I know, I know...Gor.
but he really had some great ideas as long as you can get past all the female slave rants.
Because dustjackets are annoying as heck, and I end up taking them off and leaving them at home so they don't get all roughed up by normal use of the book.
ReplyDeleteAlexander is correct. Dust Jackets serve no purpose once I've bought the book. They get in the way, flop all around, and ultimately get torn up and look like crap. Their only reasons to exist are to draw me in as I walk through the store and serve as an excuse to pay the obnoxiously high price of most hard cover books.
ReplyDeleteDown with dust jackets!
On a semi-related note, it seems that more and more rpg books are coming out as hardcover. In the past the main book for a game might be hardback, or the even whole system could be paperpack. Now I like a nice hardback as much as the next guy, but there are a lot of books out there now that I think would be better served as a paperback with a lower pricepoint.
Q1: A few have, just not recently. The Traveller Book came with a dust jacket, for example (my copy still - miraculously - has one). So did one of the old (Herndon? Reston?) 2nd Edition RuneQuest hardcover, IIRC. Fantasy Wargaming did, too ... and for another example (also old-school) the Encounter Critical hardcover comes with one ;)
ReplyDeleteI can recall at least one RPG that came _in a slipcase,_ come to that. I'm pretty sure the industry has at least experimented with every book-pushing-gimmick short of pop ups and scratch-and-sniff (and if I had the budget for pop ups and scratch and sniff, oh GOD would I have a field day ...)
But basically I agree with what's been said above ... a dust jacket doesn't actually do anything. It's frippery that adds to cost, so on the shelves of a modern game-shop it would only make sense on an edition produced specifically for boutique / collector / consumer-whore type customers, rather than gamers actually looking to game.
It's frippery that adds to cost, so on the shelves of a modern game-shop it would only make sense on an edition produced specifically for boutique / collector / consumer-whore type customers, rather than gamers actually looking to game.
ReplyDeleteWould it be mean of me to suggest that there are enough games like that such that my original question stands?
Oh, I just remembered one of the things that I hate most about dust jackets-
ReplyDeleteWhen you get a book from the library, and it's got a map printed on the inside of the cover, but there's a dust jacket and it's been taped down with super-duper librarian tape, so you can't read half of the map. So you're given the choice between defacing the dust jacket (and risking library fines) or flipping from the inside front cover to the inside back cover to see the whole map. I absolutely HATE that.
Also, Sorcerer came with a dustjacket, though I promptly removed it (in part because I didn't like the art on it).
ReplyDeleteWould it be mean of me to suggest that there are enough games like that such that my original question stands?
ReplyDeleteIt wouldn't be mean to me, but it would, perhaps, be mean to the designers of those games. :)
Well, it would be mean if you're suggesting that EC is such a game. I hope you're not :(
On second examination:
ReplyDeleteDid you mean to say "gamers"?
... because that would be a lot less upsetting.
As S. John notes, some old school RPG hardcovers did come with dustjackets (The Traveller Book being the one I remember most), but, if I had to guess, I'd say that they don't come with them now because of tradition -- the 1e hardbacks didn't have dustjackets didn't have them and they set the standard for what followed. Why AD&D hardcovers didn't have them I don't know. Again, I can guess and my feeling is that those books were never expected to be sold in traditional bookstores and so probably used a different design model than if they had.
ReplyDeleteWas I thinking of EC when I typed that? No. But the existence of the hardbound EC did boggle me at first. But given that Lulu probably makes it fairly easy to add the option I'd offer one too if I was in your position.
ReplyDeleteMore to the point, I was specifically thinking of the various self-described Collector's Editions of recent years: Cthulhu, Rifts, D&D. Those were all, IIRC, faux-leather, but a cloth-cover with shiny dust jacket edition seems like a logical place such a trend could go.
One real advantage to the AD&D approach is that it makes the cover art permanent without printing it twice. With a traditional hardcover (which isn't case-printed under the dustjacket) the art exists only on that flimsy piece of paper; under the cover you have blank cloth stamped with the title and not much else.
ReplyDeleteWith the cover art printed directly on the boards (as is the case with most RPG hardcovers), you only end up paying for that full-color bleeded glossy cover once, and it's permanently attached.
With the most expensive hardcovers short of leatherbounds (or faux-leatherbounds), you have both: full-color glossy case-printed cover art plus a full-color glossy duplicate on the dustjacket, but at that point you're adding expense multiple times.
Was I thinking of EC when I typed that? No. But the existence of the hardbound EC did boggle me at first.
ReplyDeleteThe EC hardcover is meant to be absurd, though, so it should boggle on a different wavelength than [frex] the CoC collector's edition, which (as near as I can tell) isn't absurd on purpose.
But given that Lulu probably makes it fairly easy to add the option [...]
It's the other way around. They didn't, at that time, offer a hardcover version without a dust-jacket, so I had no choice but to do a dust-jacket if I wanted to make hardcover an option. These days, they've added more choices as their capabilities have expanded, but I'm content to leave well enough alone in that case (at least until it comes time to update the interior).
More to the point, I was specifically thinking of the various self-described Collector's Editions of recent years: Cthulhu, Rifts, D&D. Those were all, IIRC, faux-leather, but a cloth-cover with shiny dust jacket edition seems like a logical place such a trend could go.
Sure, although at that point you'd be stepping down a notch on the general scale of "prestige" editions, where faux-leather is a step more expensive than (and thus, to the consumerist brain, a step superior to) cloth-and-dustjacket. So if you're targeting the collector segment of fandom (which certainly exists, despite laying out those sticky trap-strips) you'd be offering something that's generally regarded a shade less shiny.
One other observation: A majority of hardcovers today published outside the fiction aisles (cookbooks, reference books, cool things like those DK books for kids, etc) use case-printed cover art rather than dustjackets. Novels still tend to come with dustjackets, and some coffee-table reference books do, but most publishers seem to be embracing (if nothing else) the greater durability that case-printing provides the cover image. It's been a few years since I last worked at a bookstore, but I recall that we had regular problems with dustjackets tearing in transit (on the top and bottom books in the stack).
ReplyDeleteObviously you haven't been listening to clutch. More yetis.
ReplyDeleteQ2: Soundgarden was great, and I'll stop to listen to 'Black Hole Sun' anytime it plays. Of course, like most "90s bands", they got started and put out their first albums in the 80s.
ReplyDeleteOn the Soundgarden front, might I suggest that Audioslave takes that rockingness to even greater levels—the vocals of Soundgarden, combined with instrumentals of Rage Against the Machine?
ReplyDelete