The NY Times has a spot-on article about "feature creep," or the death of products we love by the 'need' for constant improvement.

It happens in books too. We're in the final throes of Goodbye Madame Butterfly and last week, when visiting the printers I had to make a conscious decision to hold back on going too wild with all the beautiful paper they have. A couple weeks ago I saw a book (which shall remain nameless) that scared the hell out of me. It had a light red translucent, plastic-like cover with dark red letters printed on it, wrapped over some hardcover boards that were full with four-color printing plus a garish and blinding gold foil stamping. It finished off with full color endpapers and a Tobira made of the same horrid red plastic paper on the cover ... Covered in un-kerned type pulled from what circle of type-hell, I do not know. In a way it made me want to revert to using Helvetica, Franklin and Garamond on everything. Keeping covers devoid of image. And at the most, a discrete ligature as a flourish. All in the name of keeping a book a book — a product where its analog form had achieved feature perfection over a hundred years ago.