What is the future of the book cover? Has the art of book cover come to an end with the prevailing of digital tools to copy, mix, tweak, and render ready-made graphics? Are book covers going to disappear in cyberspace where the text is increasingly framed by the web? Do e-book writers need a graphic cover at all? What kinds of roles does a book cover play on the web? As curators of this exhibition, we raised these questions to echo the concerns and sentiments of many book lovers, especially regarding “the death of literature” and “the disappearance of the book cover” in the digital age.
We have archived a representative selection of book covers and user interfaces for five literary portals of mainland China: CMFU/Qidian, Huanjian, Jinjiang, Doufu, and Tangyuan. CMFU/Qidian and Huanjian are known for their male-oriented novels; Jinjiang is reputed for novels in its female channel; Doufu and Tangyuan are recently established websites and web apps devoted to queer web novel serials (both shut down in 2022). We aim to trace and display the historical and formal transformations of cover designs and UI designs on each literary portal from the website’s earlier days to their present-day appearance. The reason why we curated both cover designs and UI designs is because of the convergence of the e-book anatomy and the web architecture in the digital age.
See the Project
- Renren Yang (Principal Investigator), assistant professor, Asian Studies, UBC
- Tianyu Li, graduate student, Asian Studies, UBC
- Junting Huang, college fellow, Comparative Literature, Harvard