Design as a selling point

I've always thought it would be a good marketing move to take a few out-of-copyright books and design them as a proof-of-talent project. Apparently, so did Penguin:

The commercial success of the commute-length gobbets – 80 titles ranging from the Communist Manifesto to Sappho’s poems to Mozart’s letters to his father – is striking since they are all in the public domain. To quote a commenter on the Guardian website: “How many of these are not available in full on Project Gutenberg?”

How to explain the appeal? Partly it’s the curation; but it also proves people like their reading matter cheap… and portable.

Perhaps this is something I'll try in the summer, when I have some downtime from other projects.