Geek and nerd though I may proudly be, full-fledged movie geek I am not. So, I feel unqualified to give Roger Ebert the send-off he deserves on this page. But I cannot simply do nothing.

Therefore, dear reader, I want to share some thoughts he inspired on the topic of the illustrated book — and, in particular, of the illustrated self-published book.

It’s not a big leap to go from movies to illustrations. After all, many movies are based upon books, but they condense ideas and cut scenes until only those who read the book can follow the story. To these devoted readers, the movie is the ultimate illustration, and why else attend but to see your favorite characters, places and scenes come to life.

If a book’s following is strong enough, making a movie of it — with all the spectacle of Hollywood — can mean big bucks. Just look at how much the Harry Potter movies made and how much they had to slice out from the books.

And yet, at the same time, the humble penciled, penned or painted illustration has been relegated almost exclusively to the realm of children’s books.

The one illustration that most books allow themselves to have is the main cover, and there’s no guarantee that it will actually illustrate anything. It might depict a thematic device (the bloody dagger on a mystery novel) or a non-descript setting (a generic small town for a novel about a generic small town): no actual characters, events, or places from the book may be realistically depicted.

The notable exceptions I can think of are the old, pulpy, mass-produced, paperback genre novels — science fiction, fantasy and romance especially. The publisher doesn’t want you to wait until page 80 to find out that this book has flying tigers in it. They’ll slap a picture on the cover that shouts, “Look! Here! Flying tigers!”

There is an art to creating a book cover. Different covers can appeal to wholly different readers.

So it is with illustrations.

I’ve had some of my own short stories illustrated. It dramatically alters the reader’s perception of the story. My image of the characters has to be expressed solely through the medium of words, and words can produce different images in the minds of different readers. That freedom to imagine is one of the powers of a good book. But when an artist steps in and draws the characters, the image they provide can override all others.

It’s not a better or worse experience, merely a different one. There is a long distance between the prose-only novel and the graphic novel, room for varying levels, amounts and uses of illustrations. And for the most part, we don’t use them.

This would be a purely academic debate if not for the rise of self-publishing. With e-readers becoming ever more prevalent and with Amazon, Barnes & Noble and others all offering online publication methods, a growing share of the book market is being taken up by self-published books. Some estimate a quarter of all e-books sold in the U.S. are self-published, and many self-published books have found their way onto best-seller lists.

Under traditional publication methods, the author has almost no control over the book outside of the words it contains. The publisher hires an artist to do the cover, the publisher picks the font, the publisher does the dust-jacket blurb. For that matter, in a newspaper like The Daily Illini, writers often don’t even write their own column titles.

The rise of self-publishing means that authors have much greater control over the artwork in their story, on the cover or in illustrations. On the low end of things, this can mean some god-awful covers by authors who have no ability in the visual arts at all (seriously, go read through lousybookcovers.com)

But authors who can hire an artist to create illustrations have a new source of readers: I can tell you without fear of contradiction that the artists who illustrated my stories have much bigger names with much bigger fanbases than I. They were certainly bigger draws for potential readers than I was.

The future of books may be wonderfully visual.

Joseph is a graduate student in Mathematics. He can be reached at

[email protected].