I wonder who that would be. 

@narnian-in-the-north like the adults who used to sit in the train with the plain covers of the early Harry Potter books, apparently not wanting to be seen reading kids' books.

Posted by: @narnian-in-the-north

I am guessing early teen readers who haven't yet encountered the Chronicles of Narnia. In my experience they are the age group that are most likely to not want to be caught reading a book with illustrations. 

Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, “and what is the use of a book,” thought Alice “without pictures or conversations?”

(In the immortal words of Lewis Carroll... that is, of course, the opening paragraph of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland    )

Seriously, if that's the reasoning nowadays, that is really, honestly sad. For starters, the Chronicles aren't aimed at teenagers. I read most of them when I was 7 (LWW came a couple of years earlier), and I should think the target audience is definitely the under-13s. They certainly don't contain any of the standard elements of today's teenage / young adult fiction. Not that it would hurt most teenagers to read them — and I'm aware a number of Narnia fans here first encountered the books in their teens, or even later — but these books genuinely are not aimed at the age group that's inclined to go "Urgh, that looks like a book for little kids... all right, maybe I do want to read it, but I don't want to be SEEN reading it!!" (And yes, I have been through that stage too, but only briefly before I decided I was going to read whatever I wanted to read and I didn't really care who saw or what they thought. )

That said, it's nothing new for publishers to republish classics with new cover art (whether or not internal illustrations are included) that they think will appeal to a particular audience that they hope will buy these books, and there have been worse examples than these genericky-fantasy-AI-resembling covers for the Chronicles of Narnia. If anyone missed these earlier this year, I hereby present to you Puffin Books' (yes, that is Puffin as in the children's division of Penguin) recent attempt at selling Jane Austen's six novels to "young-adult readers"...

(I mean, OK, some of those guys on the covers are quite nice looking, but seriously... I first got hooked on Jane Austen in my own teens and I can assure you, if you're not already familiar with her books, those cover illustrations really do NOT match the content. )

@courtenay, I only saw/handled LWW briefly and it reminded me of the Percy Jackson books I've seen my nieces and nephews reading, albeit slimmer. The Pevensie siblings all look like teens or tweens on the cover instead of the ages Lewis intended, which is another reason I suspect these particular editions are being marketed with tweens/teens in mind.

I hadn't seen those Jane Austen editions and quite frankly I doubt they will win a new audience for her books! But I am decidedly old-fashioned in my tastes so I may be wrong.