Do you judge a book by it's cover?

This is probably not what any of you were thinking of when this thread started, but while I was checking today’s list of Bargain Books and saw :

… I was trying to figure out from the title whether the constraints in question were metaphorical or physical corsets, etc. — it turns out the author was speaking very broadly about all varieties of constraints).

This reminded me of the time I was on a forum to provide Audible with inputs on ways to improve content and format from the user perspective. One of the other forum invitees had posted that he saw no need for cover images for any of his audiobooks, then cracked up when I commented that it would at least quickly tell him whether his search for Bound to Please had turned up the collection of essays by Michael Dirda, book critic of the Washington Post, in contrast to Bound to Please — à history of corsets — or Bound to Please — erotica.

Covers are much more indicative in the tradition of published hard cover and paper editions of books. For example, when I saw the hard cover of Garth Nix’s first book, Sabriel, I knew that the publishers had decided that this new author’s work was worth making a significant investment to promote — the distinctive style of Caldecott award winners Leo and Diane Dillone pulled me in to take a closer look, and probably would have done so for others who didn’t recognize/remember how covers designed by these artists had been used (under the original suggestion of Harlan Ellison) to promote the series of Ace Science Fiction Specials — what were deemed the very best titles offered in that line.

ETA: Besides, once I started noticing covers, I posted about how many books seemed to be using the same models. I later found many more instances of the same person mentioned there showing up on the covers of other books.