Gendered Book Covers.

This article on the Huffington Post has been going around the past couple of days. Author Maureen Johnson has received countless emails from boys asking if she could release a book with a less-girly cover so he could read it. It's an interesting situation. While I don't think that boys should be judged for reading a cover that's light, and airy, and girly, I do think it's interesting and a little strange that most books written by women come with a sun-spotted, breezy cover meant to catch the eyes of other women, while excluding a male audience. Meanwhile, books written by men are very serious looking and straightforward.

She writes, "A man and a woman can write books about the same subject matter, at the same level of quality, and that woman is simple more likely to get the soft-sell cover with the warm glow and the feeling of smooth jazz blowing off of it."

So Johnson has called for an end to gendered book covers, and proposed a challenge to her followers which she has called Coverflip. The results were funny, eye-opening, and interesting. Here are some flips that caught my attention:

What do you think about the swaps? Do you think there should be an end to gendered book covers? Do you think it's needed? And do you judge books by their covers?