Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

UP UNTIL A few years ago, most books in the public domain were lacking. Not lacking in words, which hadn’t changed, but lacking in style, lacking in design, lacking, mostly, in the emotional bond many readers forge when (sorry!) they judge a book by its cover. Most of the classics found on Project Gutenberg didn’t have a cover, and those that did tended to have a scanned, grainy image from a long time ago. “It might technically be available, but if it is, it’s ugly and poor quality,” Jennifer 8. Lee, a co-founder of digital literary studio Plympton, says of the covers on many public domain texts.

It feels wrong to complain about something that’s free, but without a cover, a book, though certainly still a book, is just a bit less gripping. Two years ago, Lee and her collaborators at Plympton were redesigning the website for DailyLit, which aims to get people to read small chunks of fiction daily. They figured they’d use books from Project Gutenberg, the volunteer effort to digitize and archive classic works in the public domain. Then they saw what they were working with. Lee considered commissioning new covers. “It was prohibitively expensive,” she says. Then she recalled a conversation she had with Creative Action Network, a startup aimed at crowdsourcing artwork to support artists and social causes. (Remember Design for Obama? That was them.)...