[Hitch]

Originally Posted by KevinH

Yes that is what my tests show as well. I started with a fresh epub with a cover and marked it as the cover properly in the opf and then e-mailed that epub to my iPad and added it to Books. Books then created the iTunesArtwork from my cover image on the fly so it would not have to parse the entire opf just to figure out the cover.

Which is at it should be. When I test-load ePUB on my latest iPad, which is 1 OS cycle old, sure, the cover displays just fine.

Are you saying that commercial epubs are being generated that have no cover image file in them and people add an iTunesArtwork file to act as the cover?

Not ours, but have I seen it? Oh, yes. We seem to get a fair number of ePUBs "for fixing" that don't have covers. If you ask me WHY, I cannot tell you.

However, I do know that you can, for example, upload coverless ePUBs at B&N, too and yes, effectively prepend the uploaded product image cover.

Amazon does the same bloody thing and if you do have a mobi or ePUB with a cover in it, in fact, they literally yank the damn thing out and prepend the uploaded cover (product image). On the one hand, it gives publishers the ability to easily change their covers, without having to go back to their bookmakers, so that's a good thing, but, then you get this exact sort of confusion.

Why on earth do that if one is being auto generated for you as a cache file? Also any book bought from the Apple bookstore typically has DRM that prevents you with messing with it anyway right?

AFAIK, but I think they're simply thinking about it differently. I am not sure that they (Apple) are thinking about the cover inside the ePUB inasmuch as they are thinking about how the cover appears on the Books-f/k/a-iBooks Bookshelf on the device(s). Seriously, let's not forget--this is APPLE we're talking about here. Appearance is all. I think that the interior cover is...an unintended side effect?

So
- if there is no cover image in the epub as determined by the opf settings

<snippage for brevity>

But I can not imagine that people would not put a proper cover in an epub and mark it in the opf properly since Apple's Books app will nicely create the required cache pieces for all normal epubs.

Well, that's how I would think about that, and your last paragraph--except I seem to see an awful lot of cover-less ePUBs. It's weird, I'm the first to agree, but...

Is this some old holdover before Books properly created the needed cache files?

I'm sorry, I don't know. It's entirely possible, given that the goddamned plist is still in there.I honestly do not recall this "from the early days" with iBooks' Book Asset Guidelines. I do know that the latest Asset Guidelines I've seen still calls for the cover to be manifested with "cover-image" as the property.

I also know that they very specifically and separately refer to the "marketing image" (cover) and the internal cover, as two different things. They refer to the marketing image as being delivered "alongside" the book asset. And as far as I know, the language used in their Asset Guide hasn't changed in..7 years, give or take? https://help.apple.com/itc/booksasse...oj/static.html

Hitch