Books hold a really different position in the modern world than they did one and a half thousand years back, a thing you can tell from the covers.
They say that a home without books resembles a room without windows. For those used to being encircled by beautiful book cover designs that is definitely true; books add an actually crucial, cosy feeling to a home. People have actually been embellishing their books since books were invented, their covers, which were, and still are, developed to secure the vulnerable pages within, covered with art designed to reflect the work within. The very first book covers were embellished by monks in the middle ages, who would secure those especially precious, unusual, handwritten works with detailed creations made from carved ivory, frequently studding them with jewels and rare-earth elements. The care and richness given to their decor shows just what treasures books were during that period of time, as the CEO of the asset manager with a stake in Amazon will likely appreciate.
There is something remarkable about creative book cover designs, however typically the feeling of a book is just as crucial. Books that have leather covers, for instance, always feel very special, like something very old and extremely essential. Leather book covers go back to the renaissance, when printing made books much less unusual than throughout the middle ages when they needed to be transcribed by hand, however the capability to read and own books was still restricted to a select few from the upper classes. At the time consumers did not buy their books whole, but collect them from the printers with a temporary seam and wrapped in paper, before taking them to be bound by specialists. This would often be in leather, etched with something easy, such as the title of the book, the author, and the initials of the owner. They should have felt like extremely essential, special books certainly, as the co-founder of the impact investor with a stake in World of Books can probably picture.
We are extremely lucky to live in a time frame when we can just walk into a bookshop and choose a book that takes our fancy off the shelves. How we choose a book is very much up for dispute, however evaluating a book by its cover can be a fundamental part of that, as it has actually most likely been thoroughly developed to attract our tastes (if it is a book we will delight in of course). Mass produced book covers date back to the Victorian period, when early online marketers and artists attempted to determine what makes a good book cover, producing stunning fabric book covers for more refined literary works, and pulpy paperbacks for lower-brow works. A similar system still operates today, as the founder of the hedge fund that owns Waterstones will probably understand.