Those look like the covers I often see on library books from the Randy Penguin. And yes, if you open the books with an editor, you will find the cover image is the one displayed when the book is opened while the thumbnail is supplied by Kobo's servers.
If you are sideloading the ebooks, you can use calibre and either it's builtin Polish function or the Modify ePub plugin to update the covers if the book is not DRM protected. As an alternative, you can use the Kobo Utilities plugin to update the cover images for books downloaded from Kobo or already sideloaded on your Kobo ereader after you have updated them in the calibre metadata download/edit tool.
On yet another hand, I'm not sure why so many people seem so concerned about the cover image. They are not something that I am that enthused about since I see them for the fraction of a second it takes to the next page. My screensaver uses random images from the screensavers directory.
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