Mobi ebook covers not showing on Kindle PW

[Aeris]

Update:
Sorry, I was wrong, read the Niluje explaination below

Hi there,

I've found a nice workaround to display your ebook covers on kindle paperwhite after converting them with calibre.

It has been suggested to remove the ASIN metatag (for example enabling "facebook" option in mobi output settings), but this caused a problem: the books were marked as "personal" and put in the "documents" category.

I've noticed that all the covers show up, with the updated version of Calibre, if you send them along with the .apnx file generated by Calibre. In order to do this, you must simply convert your new books with Calibre without enabling the facebook option, then send them to device using Calibre. But, what to do if you have already stored all your e-books on kindle and you miss only the .apnx files?

THE METHOD I'VE USED

1. I connected my PW, started Calibre and selected all the files that were already stored on the device

2. My books were in the folder /documents/mobi/. So I renamed the "documents" folder into "documents2", and created a new empty folder called "documents", like the original one

3. From Calibre, I selected the "send to device" option, then "send a specific format to", "primary memory" (not sure of the exacts translations from italian)

4. After the trasfer was complete, I went to the documents folder, selected all the generated folders (not files, folder only!) and copied them into the old /documents2/mobi/ folder, where my books where stored

5. I answered yes to the answer about merging folders

6. Then, I removed the temporary /documents/ folder, and renamed the old one back to /documents/mobi

7. Now all the book covers, thanks to the .apnx files, where shown in kindle home

ALTERNATIVE METEOD YOU COULD TRY

You can try also to use the APNX generator plugin for Calibre (https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...d.php?t=126220). I didn't try it and can't say if it is a faster way or not.


Let me know if you have any corrections, doubts or notes regarding this methods.

[NiLuJe]

Unrelated. The apnx files handle the page numbers, not the covers/thumbnails.

For 'fresh' sends of new books through calibre, there are no issues anymore. If you're updating a broken book, you may indeed annoy the Kindle catalog (which in turn can cause the broken thumbnails issue) by doing it without deleting the book from the device UI first, so that's my usual answer.

(If you have a lot of books to update, you can do it in two passes: plug, mass delete, unplug, plug again after the UI fully refreshes, send updated copies through calibre).

[Aeris]

Ok I will take off the "Solved" tag from the title... thank you for explainations!

PS how to do it? XD

[dreams]

"Solved" removed from title
moderator

[Aeris]

Thank you

Last thing for Niluje: I trust you completely about apnx... but, seeing that it worked for me and I didn't touch the original .mobi files, could it be that adding an apnx to the book folder forces the Kindle to fetch again the book cover?

[NiLuJe]

@Aeris: That's a reasonable assumption to make, and the Catalog system is already murky enough as it is, so I never really tried that .

(That's assuming when you say 'cover', you mean the cover thumbnail when the Touch/PaperWhite Home screen is in 'Cover View' mode).

One thing to keep in mind is that if the books in question have a valid ASIN (ie. they come from Amazon), then it's also likely that they'll end up with a proper thumbnail on their own when the Kindle eventually gets to it (they're fetched from Amazon, not built from the file on your device).