The Kindle edition of The Eye of the World is now available on Amazon.com, and with it comes the new artwork that was promised a few weeks ago:
Now, of all the great scenes in The Eye of the World they chose Rand on the boat? Seems a little banal, even compared to the old cover art, which everyone is probably familiar with. Still, I’m interested in seeing the covers for each of the upcoming E-books. I’m just hoping there’s a bit more meat to the artwork. Of course, I couldn’t leave without the obligitory At-least-it’s-better-than-the-junk-they-put-on-the-cover-of-The Gathering Storm rant.
The painting on the cover is by David Grove.
LOL, WoT is cursed by poor cover design decisions.
It does look like a rather boring section of a potentially awesome piece of art.
It looks like a cover for ‘Treasure Island’ or something… I quite like the style actually, it’s just a shame that it completely misrepresents the book. I mean, don’t they only spend about 3% of the book on a boat?
James, as ususual you’ve stolen the words from my lips. I quite enjoy the layout of the cover, and the choice of colours, and even the painting as a standalone product. But it doesn’t properly represent what’s between the pages at all.
Over on Dragonmount, Irene Gallo explained the idea behind the cover:
It seemed a natural to start the series with a portrait of a young Rand beginning an epic journey, the scope of which he could perhaps sense but not truly grasp. David’s luminescent paint lights Rand from within. In a way, it seems to be a portrait of Rand best seen at this time, when readers know so much about what lies ahead of him.
The Eye of the World and that scene with Rand on the boat was memorable, but hardly the most impactful in the novel.In general, I don’t get the fetishization of book art covers around the sci-fi/fantasy world, but in this case I see even less why it matters: This is for an e-book, yes? I doubt that the virtual “cover” really matters all that much. If people are buying it on Amazon for their Kindle, then it’s unlikely that they’re buying it because they came across it while scrolling through the e-book listings and the art caught their eye; rather, they probably thought the actual book sounded interesting and decided to seek out the Kindle version for themselves.
It’s true that ‘Cover Art’ on E-books is rather redundant, and arguing about it is even moreso. But Tor made a big deal about the upcoming re-covering of the series’ E-book editions, and it’s always disheartening to see a publishing line up a great artist like Grove and then give him a rather tepid scene to work with.
Plus, dude, it’s the Internet. What would we be if we didn’t argue in endless circles?
;)
The cover does have one advantage: it bigs up the Tower of Ghenjei which, on first reading, does feel like an irrelevant bit of filler detail only to come back and be much more important later on. That, at least, is a nice touch.
What I see is an appeal by the publisher to non-fantasy readers.
The rest of my opinions mimic those already posted here.