Why don’t you laminate your book covers anymore? They’re so ugly and boring and no one will read them unless they are pretty. You know that saying “Don’t judge a book by its cover?” Well, news flash, EVERYONE DOES. And books don’t last as long when you don’t protect them with a cover. Think of the trees you’re killing by throwing away those covers. Authors put a lot of time into designing a cover they find appropriate to give the potential reader a first-impression of what the book is. I understand that you are trying to cut back on laminating costs so that it can be transferred to other parts of the library, but why don’t tape the covers on without laminating them?
Covers are indeed a great way to advertise the book’s content, but as we reviewed our budget this year, we had to make some decisions about where we could save money. Lamination costs were identified as a savings that would impact the university community less than other possible cuts. Book jackets are rather fragile, so taping them on unlaminated would give us lots of slightly chewed-up jackets we’d need to remove eventually, anyway.
We are currently displaying the book covers around the Library as a way of advertising new books and we offer the book jackets to students – to recycle for their own displays or to use. We are not throwing them away.
For in interesting discussion of how publicists and authors work together (ideally) to determine a book cover, members of the Puget Sound community can see this article, “Whose cover is it anyway?” from the Journal of Scholarly Publishing.