a generic cover is one thing. many places create a "cover" for e-books which is just text giving the name of the book, and maybe the author as well. kind of like the generic products at the store, labeled as "corn", or "cereal", or "beans", or "soup", or "bean soup". it's not all that pretty, but it works. i mean, really, "alice's adventures in wonderland" _should_ have a psychedelic cover, but "alice in wonderland" works... at least we can tell it apart from "war and peace" or "flatland". so yeah, a generic cover is one thing. *** but project gutenberg e-books? well, they take "generic cover" to a whole new level, baby... because _every_darn_book_ gets the _same_ generic cover! it's as if every product in the store got the _same_ label -- so that _everything_ got labeled as "supermarket product". imagine if peanuts were labeled as "supermarket product", and butter was also labeled as "supermarket product", and _peanut_butter_ was also labeled as "supermarket product". make it pretty hard to tell 'em apart, wouldn't it? but every book in the p.g. library gets the exact same cover. it's as if every book is given a cover that says "book". : +) alice in wonderland? "book" war and peace? "book" flatland? "book" because, you know, they're pretty much interchangeable, right? if you have read one of them, you've read them all. so let's give them all the same cover -- "book"... except... it would be one thing if it was an actual image of a _book._ but no! no sir! that'd be too obvious... too skeuomorphic. so project gutenberg uses a picture of a _p.d.a._ and not just _any_ p.d.a., mind you, but one that looks to be right out of 1993. you'd think it would be hard to tell, from a mere image, but this graphic actually _screams_ "clunky"... you can tell this was an early p.d.a., one of the ones that was big, and _heavy_, and cost an arm and a leg when it was new. it probably had 640k of memory (because who needs more?), and i bet it could run _a_full_3_hours_on_a_single_charge_... i guess project gutenberg wants a generic cover that will say "old school" -- befitting its status as e-book pioneer -- and this graphic does that, baby, it does that _in_spades_... because nothing says "e-book" like a picture of a p.d.a. *** yep, that "blue p.d.a." image will hang in a museum someday. so i hope you appreciate its historic significance _right_now_... -bowerbird