Now, I know people always say "don't judge a book by its cover", but lately I've been wondering if that always applies to books. Like with people, ok, they're always more than they seem. But with books? I feel like you can sometimes look at a book's cover and go "Yeah, I probably won't like that book."
Like regardless of whether or not the book is well thought out, deep, and rich with emotion, the cover sets the tone for your whole experience. Otherwise interesting dialogs could feel pretentious or boring. I think it's also important to take into account the kind of book. If it's a comic, it shows you what kind of art to expect, maybe some character dynamics, it can demonstrate the themes of the story using symbolism and composition. For novels, it's a bit trickier, because it can do a lot of those same things, but I feel the most important aspects of novel covers are setting the tone of the story or helping the reader visualize things they'll read about in the book. The cover of a novel paints the picture that's gonna be in the mind of the reader whenever they open it up, it should get them in the mindset you want them in for your story.
None of this is to say that a story with a boring cover can't be good or a story with a cool cover can't suck, but I'm more likely to check out the story with the cool cover because it gets me interesting. Comics are luckier in that aspect tho. You can crack them open and catch a glimpse of what content you're actually getting, what the art looks like, how the dialog flows, action, etc. With a novel, however, you can't do that quite as easily (at least I can't, idk about some of you), but that's why some books select a paragraph or so of narration/dialog as a preview to put on the back cover (see that, it comes back to the cover).
My final verdict is that maybe you shouldn't judge books by their cover, but I'm a human with human tendencies and I'm often prone to passing judgment based on first impressions, so a good cover helps a lot. Especially since sometimes I don't really know what I'm looking for, but I have a very specific vibe I crave and covers are usually pretty good at giving off the vibe of the story.
I'm interested in what other people have to say tho, so please lemme know if you agree, disagree, have adjacent thoughts, are indifferent, or some other thing I'm too tired to predict (literally, it's 1am, I about to go to sleep)