There WILL be new covers. (Our Scholastic source told us that they are supposed to be “ventricular”. Neither of us knew what that meant, but we’re guessing 3D covers).
"Ventricular" is a medical term describing the "push" part of an animal heart. "Lenticular" means "lens-shaped" and (among other things) describes a type of printing that looks different from different angles.
Lenticular printing can be used for two things.
First, you can make a decent, not perfect, 3D effect that's much larger and less expensive than the plain-light holograms on credit cards etc. It looks pretty darn cool, especially because lenticular printing is rarely used for this purpose so it catches people by surprise.
Or, you can use it for a sad-looking animation that never really works out right, the old "tilt to make Mr. Cheezy's arm wave" gag.
I think I know where Scholastic is going with this. Yeah. "Tiltamorphs."
I'm jaded though, believing that there's not much that can top the
Japanese covers.
Actually, here's what I'm worried about: lenticular printing is even more expensive than normal hard cover. It's not so much a problem of real printing costs (
maybe another $1 per volume), but that there's an industry rule that you have to make people pay more for fancier covers. (Seriously. Hardcover usually costs 25 cents more per volume than soft to print.) Last time around, Animorphs was priced to sell. It looks like they're going for a higher price point this time, what my terribly cynical self fears is a privishing attempt to kill off 2.0.
