I'd argue that cover art is still important even in the digital age. Humans are visual creatures, and your first impression of a book is always the cover. Whe

I'd argue that cover art is still important even in the digital age. Humans are visual creatures, and your first impression of a book is always the cover. Whether you like it or not, many people will always judge books by their covers. Digital typesetting is actually still a difficult thing to do. The state of ereader rendering engines is comparable to the browser wars circa IE5. Each ereader family has different attributes it does and doesn't support, and sometimes they support the attributes in different ways. (For example, on a Kindle, text-align: center will reliably center text. On a Nook, text-align:center is applied BEFORE text-indent, so if try to center indented text, it won't look right). At this point in the game you still need a professional if you want your book to look perfect on every major platform. Even if an author wanted to individually outsource each of these aspects, they would have to first research the market, find the right people, negotiate prices, take a risk on quality, manage every aspect of that, and so on. Writers are busy writing. Many don't have the time or inclination to learn the intricacies of the professional publishing business just to save a few bucks. There are already some services that take care of all of that for you--bookbaby for example--but at that point you're still self-publishing, without the implicit validation that I think is the most important part for readers.