There are categories of covers. Some are Harlequin Romance type covers and I skip those without having to think. Small and glossy, with stormy backgrounds and bosoms. Then there are pastoral landscape covers, usually by
religious novelists. I skip those. Then there are skary horror/mystery books with covers
that have a cutout flap in front so you can see the corpse on the second glossy cover right behind it. Skip.
There’s a category called “trade paperbacks”, often taller and thinner than the above, and the cover, even if paperback, is matte instead of lipstickishly glossy. I think these are marketed for people with “taste”, hence calmer presentation.
I look at these. What a patsy.
My fave indy bookstore carries used-and-new and has tables of juicy political-analysis books. I have a lot of trouble not buying those because I want to read them right away. But the store never accept them as trade-ins in for credit – the information becomes superseded too quickly, given the nature of news in our culture. I read pieces of them standing up for an hour or so, shifting from foot to foot.