Just because they can, should they?

There's scarcely an ad for books that doesn't depict the book's dust jacket, sometimes too small. No matter how tiny the image of the cover, though, there's always room these days to incorporate a drop shadow, thanks to Photoshop. The notion probably is that the image will pop from the page, thanks to its phony three-dimensional aspect. I don't think that it does. The drop-shadow is no more than a handy cliche. I'm reminded of the early days of PageMaker and publications using the standard sans-serif face for heads and subheads and the ever-available version of Times New Roman or Century Schoolbook for the body because additional typefaces were so expensive. In those heady early days, people just could not resist using those rounded-corner boxes.