I have to confess that I’m not a big e-book person. I’d far prefer to read a print book. I do love e-books for travel, when I can bring a whole library with me in my tablet. Otherwise, I mostly read e-books when I can’t get that book in print. One weird reason I like print books is having easy access to the jacket blurb. It’s easier to choose which book out of my library I want to read if I can look at the back cover or inside jacket flap to see what the book is about. When I’m scrolling through my e-book library, all I have are the front covers.

Then while I’m reading, I have a habit of flipping a paperback over or flipping back to the inside cover flap to reread the blurb. I guess it’s a way of reassuring myself about what might happen—is this character I just met likely to be a romantic possibility or maybe a villain? If the character is going to do something else big in the book, as mentioned in the blurb, that means they’ll survive this encounter. Or maybe this scene is going to be what launches them into the stuff mentioned in the blurb. I’ve caught myself a few times flipping my tablet over to look at the back when I’m reading an e-book, like I’m expecting to find the cover blurb there.

And that has had me thinking that it would be nice if the cover blurb was somehow in an e-book, so I could open a book in my library and see what it’s about when I’m deciding what to read or so I could flip back to it easily while I’m reading.

Is that something other readers might like? Because I’m considering adding that to the e-books I publish. Most of the e-reading platforms automatically open the book to the start of chapter one, so you’d have to know to go back to it or look for it. If it’s near the front, though, it affects the sample you can read before deciding to buy. You can see the blurb on the sales page, so that’s one less page of sample readers might get. If the book is automatically going to open to chapter one so that you’d have to look for the blurb, then maybe I could put it at the end, like a back cover blurb, but that seems weird to have the blurb be at the end of the book.

What do you think? Would it be helpful to have the book description somewhere in the e-book? Where would it make sense to have it? Or is there a way of getting to that in your Kindle library that I’m not aware of?