On 23/02/2008, WJhonson@aol.com WJhonson@aol.com wrote:
"Reasonable" is an added herring. Fair use is fair use. Book covers should be allowed to be used, without restriction. All book covers are fair use.
I regularly see *immensely* silly uses of book covers - the cover art of randomly selected contemporary editions of classic novels used as an illustration for the article, which seems to have little or no practical benefit to the article and *certainly* have no 'uniqueness'. In such cases, there are a dozen different images we could use, neither of which has any merit over the other.
The last case I remember - an Oxford World's Classics image on [[Tom Brown's Schooldays]] - also turned out to have been used as an illustration for an article about cricket, because he was playing it on the book cover.
I find myself doubting that *that* is automatically presumable to be fair use...