Barnes & Noble's Diverse Editions Controversy

Overview

Barnes & Noble's Diverse Editions Controversy refers to a line of book covers for twelve classic young adult novels released by the bookstore chain Barnes and Noble in February 2020 for Black History Month. The book covers were aimed at promoting representation but many commentators on Twitter criticized the editions for merely changing the ethnicity of the characters on the cover of white authors' books rather than promoting writers who are people of color.

Background

On February 4th, 2020, PublishersWeekly announced on Twitter^[1] that "Barnes & Noble Fifth Avenue to launch sales of classic novels with new covers promoting diversity" attaching an AM New York^[2] article which explains that there will be new "diverse custom covers" for Alice in Wonderland, Romeo and Juliet, The Three Musketeers, Moby Dick, The Secret Garden, The Count of Monte Cristo, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Emma, The Wizard of Oz, Peter Pan, Treasure Island and Frankenstein. The tweet gained over 1,800 likes and 540 retweets in a day (shown below).

Spread

On February, 4th, 2020, Twitter user @BCMorrow^[3] commented on the news by tweeting, "Barnes & Noble was like, well if Netflix can change the thumbnail to show the Black extra in the background of a show they want you to watch…" (shown below). The tweet garnered over 3,700 likes and 400 retweets in a day.

The next day, @michael_deforge^[4] tweeted a screenshot of an article claiming that AI chose the book titles for these editions and captioned it "this is an underrated bit of awfulness from the Barnes and Noble book covers thing" (shown below, left). That same day, Twitter user @Filq2001^[5] tweeted a Well boys, we did it meme captioned, "Barnes and Noble: *Changes the race of the characters on the covers. Barnes and Noble:" (shown below, right).

Various Examples

Search Interest

Not Available

External References