While checking out of Safeway the other day, I noticed that they were selling a paperback of one of the Twilight novels. I have neither read any of the books or seen any of the movies, so that’s not what this post is about. Rather, this post is about the fact that this particular version of the paperback had Kristen Stewart’s photo on it with the familiar “Now a Feature Movie” or somesuch along the bottom.

While I have not seen the movies or read the books for the Twilight series, I have read (or more accurately heard) the book and seen the movies of the Jason Bourne series. It’s really pretty difficult to get a copy of the paperback of any of the books that have become movies without a picture of Matt Damon on the cover. The problem is that the books and the movies have almost nothing in common. It’s not simply replacing one cover for the book with another cover for the book that happens to include an actor from a movie based on the book. It’s replacing the cover of the book with another cover that includes an actor based on an entirely different movie with the only things in common being a few character names and a plot involving amnesia.

This is particularly true for the second book. The movie takes place in Germany, the book in Asia.

I know full well why they do it. I still find it irritating. Even though I assume that the Twilight movies have more in common with the book than the Bourne movies, and though Kristen Stewart is incredibly pleasant to look at, that one bothers me because the original covers to the book are particularly visually interesting and compelling. I can’t tell you how many times a book’s cover jumped out at me only for me to look at it and see “Oh, it’s a Twilight book” and start looking elsewhere.

Though I do understand why they do it, I wish that they would at least keep the original covers available for those of us that don’t want to mix media. It’s almost enough to make me want to go ahead and buy the fourth and fifth book while the covers are still Damon-Free.