Quote:
Originally Posted by odamizu
Yup. The book has to be available on Amazon.
Incidentally, you can insert any ASIN you like, it doesn't have to match the title. The Kindle will pull whatever cover matches the ASIN, even if it's a totally different book 
If a book has multiple editions, each with their own ASIN, you can switch covers by switching ASINs. Goodreads is a good source for ASINs for editions that are no longer available for sale and therefore no longer searchable on Amazon's site. Visiting different Amazon sites by country will also give you different ASINs, allowing you to pick between, say, UK, Canada, and US covers, if they're different.
But still, as you say, it's silly -- nay, RIDICULOUS! -- that Amazon pulls thumbnails from their server rather than simply extracting them from the ebook. Seems like a whole lot of extra, unnecessary effort for everyone, including them. |
I know you can do all that, but honestly it is just sooooooo much easier to sideload with calibre. Or at least just use quiris' script. It may be worth bundling as a KUAL extension, actually.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Katsunami
(First, I'd like to say that I never use the Amazon e-mail service, so I don't know much about it.)
The only reason I can think of why they do it like that is because it could be impossible for the Kindle to extract the cover. For example, all of my covers are 1024x768 pixels, where possible. Most of them are around 500 kB. Many of my books are in the fantasy-genre, and have large maps.
If the AZW/dual-mobi format is compressed, like EPUB, the Kindle would need to uncompress it, copy the cover out of it, remove the decompressed book, and then shrink the cover. For large books, that may take quite some effort, not to mention time.
Downloading a 50-100 kB or so thumbnail would be MUCH faster.
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The book has to be extracted for reading, one assumes... anyway, the cover can be extracted and shrunk... which is what the Kindle already does, if the book has a cdetype="PDOC"! And as observed, the Kindle is somewhat unique in doing this.
One would hope at least, if speed was their motivating factor, that it would first check for a downloadable copy and then fall back on extraction. This would be much faster for books that did come from Amazon but were downloaded and added to the Kindle via USB... which also suffer this problem.
Extraction is way way WAY quicker than waiting an indeterminate time for an internet connection to be activated.