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For ebooks (I can't remember how it was with pbooks), it makes very little difference to me what the cover looks like in terms of a purchase decision. The thumbnails one usually sees are too small to have much impact, and years of web browsing have desensitized me to attention-grabbing images. I'm usually looking for something specific rather than randomly browsing, and when I find what I'm looking for it doesn't matter much what the cover looks like. I'm going to spend a few seconds looking at the cover, and many hours reading the content.
But there are plenty of people who claim it makes a difference. I just wonder what the evidence for this is. Self-reporting is not a valid methodology for this sort of thing, yet it is hard to isolate the factors involved and establish that what you discover in controlled setting applies to the real world. Probably the best way woud be to publish a book with a set of cover images that are randomly presented, and then observe sales rate of each. But even then I think it would be difficult to distill the rules of success.
That said, it is probably a good idea to make sure the title is legible in the thumbnail image and adopt visual conventions of whatever genre the book will show up in. If it transcends genre, then something more neutral is probably fine.
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