Mt. Molelog

Jennifer Government Barcode gripes

I finished Max Barry's Jennifer Government last night, having enjoyed the book itself a fair amount -- it's a romping good time through a world somewhat like our own, but more so.

In keeping with my reputation for focusing on the big picture, though, that's not what this is about. Instead, this is about the cover art. And not the whole thing, just the barcode bit.

The title character, Jennifer Government, has a barcode tattoo under her eye; presumably that's her on the cover. We're told at the end of the book what the barcode is, though, and the barcode on the cover isn't right.

First, the numbers aren't right -- the numbers, "9780385507593", are mostly an EAN-13 in the "Bookland" country; they aren't possibly the right numbers for what's described in the book. Minor annoyance, but maybe that's not Jennifer on the cover after all, and besides, it lets the designer do a clever trick and put the book's own barcode as part of the cover art -- yes, that's right, 0-385-50759-3 is the ISBN for this edition of the book.

"But wait!", I hear you cry, "You said it's an EAN-13, not an ISBN, and as everyone knows they have incompatible checksum digits!" Well, yes, that's true. The book's ISBN is 0-385-50759-3, but its EAN-13 is 9780385507592. That's gripe #2.

"Now I'm even more confused!", I hear. "I'm looking right at the cover image on this very page, and it's perfectly clear that the last digit is a '2', not a '3'. What are you griping about?" Good question! When I went looking for a good cover image to use, I found that one on the author's site; it seems to match the ones Amazon Canada and Amazon UK use. Amazon.Com's, on the other hand, matches my actual cover -- besides the '3' for the last digit, it has a Kirkus Reviews blurb. Assuming the blurbed version came after the non-blurbed one, that means that at some point they went to some effort to break the cover barcode. That's gripe #3.

And, as long as I'm looking closely at the barcode, I might as well look at it -- it doesn't seem quite right. It's not -- the actual bars don't correspond with the numbers at all; it doesn't even have the left/center/right guardbars right. That's gripe #4.

I'd have preferred it match the book, but if the cover designer had chosen instead to use the book's own barcode, I'd probably have been amused at his cleverness. But having decided to do that, is it too much to hope that he actually use the book's own barcode?

2003-06-05 09:50:00 | Comments (5) | TrackBack (0) | CopyrightCartel::Books