There’s an interesting blog post on Genre Reviews about Bloomsbury white-washing their book covers (the link is actually the final outcome to the whole debacle, but includes all the links to the previous posts about it). To quote Publisher’s Weekly:
Earlier this week, criticism grew online over the cover of Jaclyn Dolamore’s Magic Under Glass, a January fantasy novel from Bloomsbury Children’s Books—the second time in recent months one of the publisher’s covers has come under fire. [...] The controversy calls to mind the online furor last summer over Justine Larbalestier’s Liar, also published by Bloomsbury, in which the cover used an image of a white girl, when the protagonist is described in the book as being half-black. [...] In the case of Magic Under Glass, the circumstances—a discrepancy between the description of a character’s ethnicity in the book and her appearance on the cover—are much the same. The protagonist, Nimira, is described in the story as having brown skin and considered by others to have “exotic” features.
