Pretty Girls and Technical-Instruction book advertising -- A Lose Lose Scenerio:

[acroyear]

You can't put a guy on the cover of a technical instruction book without inciting feminists who think your're being prejudicial by assuming that the book is therefore at too high a technical level and women shouldn't be able to read or understand it.

On the other hand...

If you put a pretty girl on the cover, you 1) run the risk of annoying femists by running a sex-appeal campaign to get guys to buy the book, and 2) imply that only girls need to read the book as guys don't *need* to read books to learn computer stuff.

Better still to have a technical book cover with 1) no people (why O'Reilly decided on Head First to get away from the animals, I'll never know) or 2) multiple people of mixes sexes/colors/etc, to imply that software development is really a team thing.

Comments

[heleneotroy.livejournal.com]

I work for a technical book publisher, and the majority of our books don't have anything on the cover. (For example: http://images.amazon.com/images/P/0784406243.01.LZZZZZZZ.jpg)
A few of our books have plant life on the cover (such as our popular title about Machu Piccu, it had a lovely photo of overgrown ruins).
A handfull of our books about management have people on the cover, but they are usually a careful mixture of races and sexes. They are also usually hazy or greyed out, a background to the text.

I guess our cover designers want to avoid the issue entirely.

Although I did have someone call today to ask what color a particular manual is. I couldn't help her.

[queenmaggie.livejournal.com]

I don't understand the need to put a picture on a book in any case... I'd prefer to see a nice binding with maybe an embossed design. I rather hate most of the book covers I see, even when the art is good, because they all seem to have absolutely nothing to do with the material inside, and to givea really wrong idea to observers about what I'm reading.