[st_albert]

Originally Posted by slowsmile

@st_albert...You've raised several issues and I have to say that I don't agree with you on most of your suggestions. This is going to take some explaining, so bear with me.

Well, I've learned by now not to argue with you, but I'll just say this:

First, in these discussions it is crucial to keep in mind the distinction between the "cover page file" which is the .xhtml file in the book browser Text directory (hereafter called the "cover page file"), and the cover image itself, which is typically a .jpg file in the book browser Images directory (hereafter the "cover image").

It is the Amazon KDP guidelines themselves, not I, which forbid the use of the cover page file. They say:

Do not add an HTML cover page to the content in addition to the cover image. This may result in the cover appearing twice in the book or cause the book to fail conversion.

This seems to be in direct contradiction to this part of your code (beginning on line 367 of cutils.py)

   # cover.xhtml -- check for bad file position
    fnames = []
    for _, href in bk.text_iter():
        file_name = os.path.basename(href)
        fnames.append(file_name)
        
    if cover_fname != '':
        if fnames[0] != cover_fname:
            message = BAD_COVER_FILE_POS
            options.RESULTS.append(['error', '', 0, message])

which is looking for just such a file. In fact, if it finds one, it should warn about THAT.

First your suggestion that you should never put a cover image into epub for KDP uploads. Well what you say might be true for epub vendors like iBooks, Nook etc but it is not true for epub uploads to KDP.

I have no idea how you concluded that I suggested that, unless you failed to distinguish between the cover image and the cover page file. What I said was:

Actually, in the epubs that I intend to convert to mobi with kindlegen, I don't have an xhtml cover page at all.

See the difference?

Lastly, I'll note that, according to the KDP guidelines, the metadata entries discussed above are mandatory, whereas the cover guide element is optional. That was the basis for my caution about relying solely on the guide element to identify the cover image.

Albert