Week 2 Discussion Answers

Q: Just as with web pages and other multimedia displays, the visual representation in how books are laid out is deemed to be important. Why is that? And what are some of the important aspects for visual representations of books? (Courtesy of Farhanah)

A: With books, the industry has been set up so that when a person is browsing books for sale, he/she should be able to instantly tell, for instance, if the cover of a book says that inside you'll find something as specific as soft-fiction of a religious theme (usually an airbrushed photo of a woman with a bonnet or period-dress costume, or a man with suspenders; the person is superimposed over a pastoral theme; the font is uniform with other books of the same genre for the most part). So it's important to have a type of uniformity in cases of maximum financial gain. It's also important to know in case you, as a writer, would want to change the industry, or to warp a genre to benefit literature as a whole.