I know this is a really old thread, but I've been trying to do exactly the same thing and had hoped to find a solution here. Well, I believe I've solved it, so I figure it's only right to share the solution.
To remove the cover from an ebook I've successfully used Calibre's ebook-meta command like this:
Code:
ebook-meta "some ebook.epub" --cover="/dev/null"
It isn't suggested anywhere in the documentation. I tried all sorts of other things which failed. It feels like a bit of a hack, but it really does seem to work. If someone finds a better way please let us know.
If you want this to ripple through a directory of epub ebooks, you could do something like this:
Code:
for f in *.epub ; do ebook-meta "$f" --cover="/dev/null" ; done
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Edited later:
Oh dear... I just found at least one ebook that won't let me remove the cover by the above method.