Your larger question, about how covers translate with content into digital formats, is really interesting. Apple has made lots of room for “visual signifiers” in the interface designs of most of its products, and the idea of cover art accompanying an album or a book seems pretty reasonable for digitized versions of cultural products that were born in the physical analog world. But cover design does seem like a silly proposition for a product that never had and never will have a printed paper cover. It’ll be exciting to see what solutions people come up with in response to new reading/listening technology. There are clever systems and ideas-for-systems for displaying cover art for digital music, for example, but the conception and production of the art itself hasn’t really changed yet.

Icons is an interesting point - most book jackets on retail and publisher websites have been reduced to the size of desktop icons and it’s something I’ve heard increasingly in cover briefs: “this has to look good on the book shelf, and 100px high on Amazon.”

Interesting too that many of the submissions to Coversourcing have been quite ‘iconic’.

Perhaps we’ll see a visual language developed to do some of that instant communication which, as you say, is still necessary, but not so easy on the screen. I don’t think it will ever be able to convey the ‘mood’ of a book as well as a good, full-size, hardcopy jacket (or a gatefold LP, etc.), but it might be an improvement on the current situation.