Ironic, isn’t it. I’ve spent a week wasting my time beating my head against a brick wall trying to change ugly covers when it finally dawned on me today that the covers don’t make any difference to the booklist whatsoever. I had always assumed and been told nothing to the contrary they were created based upon the ebook's embedded cover, but not so!
I downloaded a copy of David Brin’s excellent ‘Startide Rising’ – after having to change my amazon registration to get the one featuring the nice UK cover instead of the hideous US version! – and was stunned when I opened it in calibre to be presented not with the cover I was expecting but a plain white page with some text showing the title and author’s name plus a Penguin symbol and nothing more. I thought I was being cheated. What covers were displayed seemed to be completely random. I was even more baffled when I transferred it to my Paperwhite and the thumbnail displayed in the booklist was in fact the proper UK version which I had chased after in the first place! Realizing it was only the thumbnails that mattered, I copied all my books onto my PW, opened them one by one so they would create a thumbnail for each then re-connected via cable, opened the system\thumbnails directory, copied them all to my PC, used Photoshop to resize my scanned covers, made them greyscale, saved them using the Kindle-generated filenames and copied them all back to my PW. Upon ‘ejecting’, my booklist was populated by all the thumbnails I had created from my scanned paperbacks. Bliss!
Live and learn, I suppose. Hope this helps anyone else as confused by the issue as I was, especially after wasting time with DRM which had no bearing on the outcome anyway.
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