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Like books, e-readers and tablets need protection. Their delicate, computer-like screens can get cracked or smashed by the vagaries of life.

And like books, we spend hours staring at these delicate devices. So why not make them look more like books?

We don’t just want to protect tablets and e-readers, but honor and personalize them, and maybe bring back some of the quaint pleasures of reading an old leather-bound volume at the same time.

The most natural way to signal their special status as reading machines and engines of cultural consumption is to borrow what we know from the look and feel of book covers. And if making an e-reader look like an old hardcover book or a composition notebook adds a little trompe l’oeil fun, so much the better.

This slide show highlights some of the best faux-book covers for e-book readers and tablets.

Above: Covers made by Dodocase for the Kindle 3.

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Kindle DX Promotional Photo from Amazon.com

It’s easy to figure out why e-readers and tablets are the size that they are: They’re all about the size of paperback books, whether trade (iPad) or mass-market (the Kindle 3). Some oversized models, like the Kindle DX, are closer to big hardcovers. But why are books the size that they are? It turns out it’s because of sheep. Sheepskin, to be exact.

Carl Pyrdum, who writes the blog Got Medieval while he finishes his Ph.D. in Literature at Yale, has the skinny on book sizes. You see, before Europeans learned how to make paper from the Arabs (who’d learned it from the Chinese), books were made from parchment, which was usually made from sheepskin. Sometimes, they’d use calfskin, too; if it was really primo stuff, it was called vellum. Like reading a whole book made out of veal.

We eventually mostly gave up on parchment, because it was expensive, and hard to work with. (There’s a reason medieval monks wrote manuscripts; preparing the parchment was penance.) But all of today’s book sizes (and by proxy, most of our gadget sizes) were established in the Middle Ages, and printers and paper makers carried them over. Booksellers and publishers still use these terms today:

• Fold a sheet of parchment once (two leaves/four pages per sheet) for a folio; if you fold sheets of paper once without a cover, you’ve got a tabloid.
• Twice for a quarto (8pp/s), the size of a big dictionary or big laptop;
• Three times for an octavo (16pp/s), a hardcover or Kindle DX;
• Four times for a duodecimo (24 pp/s), a trade paperback/iPad
• Four times (a slightly different way) for a 16mo (yes, they gave up), aka mass-market paperback/e-reader;
• Five times for a 32mo, aka notepad/old-school smartphone sized
• Six times for a 64mo, or as Erasmus called it, a Codex Nano.

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16mo/Paperback/E-Reader

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All images via Got Medieval.

Story continues …

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The BookBook case for the iPad, from Apple accessory makers TwelveSouth, swaddles your precious tablet in a thick slathering of dead-cow, its hand-crafted, hand-distressed covers recalling beautifully bound books of old. It zips shut to keep out the dust, and the padded inner-chamber also contains a string and a button on either side to help make a stable a-shaped stand. It’s lovely, and will probably last way longer than your iPad.

It is also thick, doubling the depth of Apple’s slim tablet to an inch. And remember, the iPad only measures an in in its thickest part, while the BookBook will be that fat everywhere. TwelveSouth’s other BookBook case, for the MacBook Pro, also adds about a half-inch to the machine inside, but that’s a smaller percentage on a thicker computer.

It is nice-looking, though, in a lottery-winner’s bookshelf kind of way, and can be propped up next to the leather-bound sets of classics that you will never read. The price for this “tasteful” case is $70, in red or black. Available now.

BookBook for iPad [TwelveSouth. thanks, Johnny C A!]

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Since switching over to e-books for everything except cookbooks, I have a stack of dead-trees on my shelf doing nothing. As there are only so many iPad and Kindle cases I can make by gutting the hardback covers of their pages, I’m all fired up to try this great Book Lamp by Instructables member fungus amungus aka Ed Lewis.

The project is dead simple: Chop some pages from a book (Ed used the appropriately-titled Illuminatus! Trilogy from Bob Shea and Robert Anton Wilson), cut a route for the cable and insert a light. The donor lamp in this case is the $5 Lampan from (where else?) Ikea. This light also comes with a 7 Watt compact fluorescent bulb, but you could also opt for a nice cold LED bulb (avoid incandescent, though, unless the book you’re using is Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451).

Your chopping doesn’t have to be neat (look at Ed’s effort for a demonstration of just how raggedy edges can get) as it will all be hidden when you close the cover. The resulting light gives a pleasantly studious atmosphere to any shelf or side-table. I actually have a spare Lampan right here, with a broken shade. I think my weekend DIY project has just been decided upon.

Book Lamp [Instructables via CrunchGear]

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