You probably know how back cover texts on books are always positive. No surprise there: they are written and/or selected by the publishers themselves, and they want to sell the book. Recently though, I wondered how they would read if scientific reviewers got their hand on the back-cover ?

Given my own experience with this breed of vultures, I believe the opinions will be wide-ranged, but will in general be self-involved and with an absolute disregard for the actual content. This is what I came up with:

1. This author paid us a lot, so it must be a good book.
2. This is really a boring book. We didn’t not get past the first chapter. Not even on the toilet. Probably it is good though. Good luck with this read !
3. We at Oxford/Stanford publishing recognize the excellent sales this book will offer to our partners.
4. This book has great potential.
5. We tried to read the book backward and couldn’t follow it. It’s probably scientific.
6. We didn’t like the font of the book.
7. There were no nice pictures in the book.
8. Why couldn’t the author give a dense outline of the book before starting with that lengthy introduction ?
9. As a professional editor and a high selling author of two and a half book, I believe our own work is so much more interesting than what you are holding in your hands right now. For instance, we ‘develop’ our characters in our manuscripts and we ‘work’ with the reader to achieve a greater understanding of the book’s emotional plot.
10. I had to read it and was not really interested. I finished the 540 pages in 3 hours and am not impressed.
11. I only read the first sentence of each page and the story still made sense. Amazing.
12. If chapter 3 would be scrapped and the introduction placed at the end, the book would certainly have a bit more of a David Lynch feeling.
13. If you picked up this book, you probably liked the front-cover. Lets hope you like the back-cover as well because the content is worthless.
14. The HERO died !!! Hopefully this is the last in the series.
15. Carefully consider other books before buying this miserable heap of recycled paper.
16. Hopefully the hero stays dead this time.
17. I loved the little troll on page 603.
18. The footnotes really deepened the story.
19. The book has a beginning, a middle and an end.

Obviously I’m highly frustrated with scientific reviewers 🙂