I missed the earlier discussion of cover art.
Those would have been low-end cover art in the days before Photoshop was invented. Now they're just sad. The type design is lousy too.
I don't get it. I kind of thought Amazon was doing this stuff by bringing publishers from big NY house in-house. Those covers are *awful*; unprofessional.
Amazon is not a publisher. They're not really a bookseller, either. They're an online retailer that happened to start by selling books as their earliest line of merchandise because books already have database coding (ISBNs), and the peculiarities of book distribution systems meant they didn't have to pay up front for their stock. They later became nominal publishers because (1.) publishing got easy to do if you don't care about individual books and authors or brick-and-mortar distribution; (2.) it helps promote the Kindle, which Amazon does care about; and (3.) Amazon's basic model is monopolistic, so they're happy to undercut real publishers.
They don't understand the role of covers in selling book, and they wouldn't care if they did. Amazon can barely be bothered to fix ludicrous errors in their book listings. They don't give a damn about bad cover art.
Weird.
Does buying the print rights to a novel entitle the owner to the rights to the cover image, too?
No. Using that art for some other purpose is a separate right, normally called "second rights", and unless the publisher has nailed it down (which they almost never do), it belongs to the artist.
Imaginable circumstances in which the cover might be sold along with the text:
1. There was a contract between the cover artist and the original publisher which gave that publisher the right to sell the cover art to third parties. That would be a rare event in conventional publishing.
2. It's a strongly visual book, and the cover image -- illustration, photograph, or striking and distinctive visual design -- belongs to the author/illustrator. In that case, the cover is part of the overall visual content that travels with the text.
3. The book didn't come out from a conventional publisher, and the author paid for the cover art. If the contract with the artist gives the author second rights, the author can sell that along with the text. This almost never happens, because writers who go with the kind of publisher that makes you buy your own cover art don't usually know enough to secure second rights.
4. The original publisher has the brains of a snow pea, the new publisher is no better, and neither has realized that unless you have a contract that specifically says otherwise, the cover artist owns the second rights to the cover art.
In really ludicrous cases, it may be written into the contract between the publishers that the new publisher gets to use the covers, and the original publisher must furnish all the relevant cover production materials to facilitate that re-use. Writing it into the contract like that doesn't give either publisher second rights to the cover art, but it does make it easier to pin down the facts if the artist sues.
Other things the second publisher doesn't get when they buy the publishing rights: The cover copy. The cover quotes. Frontmatter or backmatter not written by the author. Also, the right to use the first publisher's typesetting, i.e. shoot high-res pictures of the first publisher's typeset pages and print from those, rather than having it re-typeset.
That last one may sound minor, but back when I was working in book production, it was the occasion of numerous scuffles in the underbrush. Production staff at one house would recognize, in the pages of another house's new edition of an older book, the unauthorized use of the typeset pages from their own edition. This was (and still may be) handled by the sinned-against production department sending a short, stiff note to the offending production department, along with an invoice billing them a couple of dollars per typeset page. They generally paid up.
I've occasionally known in-house editors to bill English-language overseas publishers for swiping their cover copy verbatim. This is proper. Good cover copy is hard to write, and freelance copywriters get paid good money to write it. If another publisher then uses that cover copy, they're using the editor as a freelance copywriter, and should pay for the work.
Digital Medievalist will know more about this than I do, but I assume the e-book equivalent would be the design, editorial work, and e-book conversion the first publisher does to the author's raw text. I don't know how that works in practice when an e-book title moves to a new publisher.
Why should they put money into new covers? Because those book reflect their brand. They are now their books. If they don't care about the covers why should I assume they care about what is inside?
The way I'd put it is that aside from the author's name (i.e., the reader happens to have read and enjoyed another book by that author), the most important selling tool is the book's cover. It's full of little signals that relate this book to other reading experiences you may have enjoyed. Unknown authors take far more damage from bad covers or no covers at all than big-name authors would take from them.
Duplicating obviously subpar covers puts me in mind of the newbie author whose first novel was caught in the collapse of the Ace Specials line. As he put it, "My book wasn't so much published as exposed."
They didn't change the covers on Marshall Cavendish books, either, after they bought the rights to MC's trade children's titles. There are some pretty bad covers there, as well.
Hundreds of books were involved in both purchases--for MC, it was over 400 titles. Even for Amazon, it probably would have been prohibitively expensive to re-design all the covers.
What matters is who owns the work, not how much it would cost to replace it.
I'd have to see the contracts, but my purely personal I-assert-nothing suspicion is that what's saving Amazon from a wave of copyright infringement actions is that many commercial artists don't have agents, aren't in the habit of making a fuss when their work is misused, and have no way of knowing when a book with their art on the cover has been sold to another house. I can imagine them taking action if their book cover illustrations were showing up on decorative cookie tins. It's harder for them to recognize Amazon's swipes as a second use of their art by a different publisher; and of course they're only going to see it if they stumble upon it by chance.
This doesn't mean they don't own the right to re-sell that art. Amazon is not in the clear. And if the original publishers wrongfully sold the covers as part of the deal, they too have walked off the cliff and are standing on air.
Here's one thing I do know: as of a few years ago, the big commercial photo and picture archives were insisting that the re-use on e-books,
by the original publisher, of hardcopy book covers that used elements derived from the archives' stock of images, constituted a prohibited second use. As they saw it, publishers could use the same cover (or a slightly modified version thereof) for any hardcopy format; but the minute that cover was reproduced in connection with an e-edition of the same book, the publisher was over the line. (They also held that it didn't matter how transformative the use by the cover artist had been, which IMO was BS.)
Thing is, they were making it stick, even when the original image was a piece of soulless stock photography, and the use made of it had been very transformative indeed.
There's also the case of
Shepard Fairey's iconic image of Obama, which was based on an unremarkable AP photo. Fairey said he accidentally scanned the wrong photo, but he still got nailed hard for the unauthorized use of someone else's image.
The only difference between these cases and the cover artists is that the cover artists aren't making a push for their rights.
