Books might be comprised of words in plain old white and black, but they are also the colour covers that they are adorned with.

When we buy a book it becomes something really personal to us. It can sometimes be weird seeing a book you like with another book cover, merely since it is not your book. This personalisation, and indeed ownership, of books was at an entirely various level at the start of the era of printing, with book covers being developed by the owners themselves, and what they thought would be the best books covers for the book. They would buy the book itself from the printer covered in paper, then bring it to a binder who would add the covers to the customer's specs. This usually suggested being dressed in leather and after that etched with the name of the book, and, most of the time, the name of the book's owner. Individuals like the co-founder of the impact investor with a stake in World of Books can probably value the ownership that people come to feel in regards to their books.
We like reading books due to the fact that they are very lovely things. This is true, however the nature of beauty that we may be discussing is certainly separate to what we might be discussing if we were speaking about, say, the visual arts. Or is it? For as long as we have actually had books we have embellished them with beautiful book cover designs that attempt to mirror the appeal of what is inside. This goes back for as long as the codex itself has been around, with middle ages monks, those charged with the protection and proliferation of the rare texts that might still be found, ornamenting each hand written text with remarkably rich and lovely designs. In fact, such was the charm held within these books that many of these creative book cover designs were sculpted into ivory or solid gold, studded with gems, and inlaid with rivers of rare-earth elements. People like the co-CEO of the hedge fund that owns Waterstones can most likely appreciate the manner in which the beauty of these book covers was created to match the beauty within the book.
When you really think of it, it is quite remarkable that a book's cover, no matter how lovely it is, manages to stand so eloquently for something that is nearly the complete antithesis of its art format-- writing in black and white. In fact, book covers have been created to reflect the emotional state of a book and interest its intended audience ever since the start of large scale publishing in the Victorian Age. Artists were entrusted with discovering what makes a good book cover for specific individuals, or to put it simply, marketing. People like the CEO of the asset manager that has a stake in Amazon can most likely appreciate the role of marketing in creating book covers.