OK, so after scouring all the various forums and spending weeks figuring this out, I thought I would post this for those of you that are technically challenged like me. So, without further ado, here are step by step instructions on how to make those stubborn sideloaded book covers show on your Nook Color. I know this process seems long (it's really not) and it REALLY works.
1. Hopefully, you have already downloaded and installed Calibre in order to convert and/or add books to your Nook Color per my previous post. If not, then go to
http://calibre-ebook.com/download and download and install the program. If you need to know how to add books to your Nook Color, then there a separate post for that.
2. Go to
http://code.google.com/p/sigil/ and download SIGIL. This is a program that Google developed that allows you to go in and fix the Metadata on a file.
3. Leave both programs open at the same time.
4. Go into Calibre and find the book that does not have a cover. Click on it one to highlight it.
5. At the top of the screen, click on the CONVERT BOOKS button and then CONVERT INDIVIDUALLY.
6. In the upper left hand corner, the INPUT FORMAT should already read EPub as you should have already imported and converted all your files to EPub as needed.
7. In the upper right hand corner, set the OUTPUT FORMAT to EPub as well. I know this seems somewhat redundant, but trust me, this process works.
8. Even if your book cover shows here, if it is not pulling through to the Nook, you need to complete this process. Leave the Calibre screen as it is, and go to the web and find your book cover.
9. You can do this several ways. You can go back to the site you obtained the book from and see if it is there. You can also check the publishers website or a booksellers website (a couple of good websites for this are allromanceebooks.com or fictionwise.com). Once you have found your cover, you want it as big as possible. If you go to the publishers or a booksellers website, typically, if you click on the image, it will pop up a little bigger.
10. Right click on the image and then on SAVE IMAGE AS. Find your desktop and then click on ADD NEW FOLDER. Call the folder what you want (I called mine Calibre Bookcovers). Wherever you put it or whatever you call it, the point is to be able to find it quickly and easily again and again.
11. The image should download as a JPG. This is very important. The Nook DOES NOT recognize any type of image except for JPG, so do not download GIF files or any other sort of pictures, they will be useless for this purpose.
12. At the bottom of the screen, click on the FILE NAME line and rename your picture. This is important as once you are in Calibre, the picture themselves will not show, only the name with a little generic picture next to it.
13. Go back into your screen in Calibre and in the middle of the screen, click CHANGE COVER IMAGE.
14. Go onto your hard drive and find your book cover. Click on it and then click OPEN.
15. Click the OK button at the bottom of the pop up. Calibre will now do a conversion.
16. Once that is done, go into Sigil. Click the OPEN button.
17. Go onto your computer hard drive and find your Calibre Library.
18. Go into the library folder and find the author and then the book you want. Finally, double click on the EPub file, NOT THE METADATA FILE.
19. On the left side of the screen, you should see BOOK BROWSER. On this list, there should be a folder called IMAGES. If it is not already open, then click the little arrow next to it to open it.
20. There may be several little blue image boxes in this folder. At the top or close to it, you should see a .JPEG file (not .JPG, you want the .JPEG file). If there are several .JPEG files, you need to double click on each one. When your book cover comes up, that is the image you want. If there is not a .JPEG picture here, then you need to repeat the conversion and addition steps in Calibre and then come back to Sigil.
21. If the book image is not called cover.jpeg, then right click on it and rename it cover.jpeg.
22. Click the SAVE button. If the image is already named cover.jpeg, click on the SAVE button anyway. This is very important, you CANNOT skip this step. Even if the name is already correct, you must click on the SAVE button in order for this process to work.
23. Go back to Calibre. Open the book again and repeat the exact same steps to convert the book from EPub to Epub and change the cover image. Again, even if the book cover shows here, click on the CHANGE BOOK COVER and reselect the book cover you downloaded.
24. Click the OK button so Calibre will do the conversion process again.
25. Now you can save the book to your Nook Color. Allow the Nook time to process the file and when you back into your library on the Nook, the cover should be there.