[Timboli]

This is obviously an old thread, but still quite relevant.

I still get cover issues with side loaded ebooks, no matter the source. It is I believe, due to a flaw in the Kobo software, that goes beyond side loaded ebooks.

I experience three cover issues with my Kobo device.

(1) Side loaded ebooks, where the cover images have been changed to gray scale (black & white) and small image within a large image, despite the epub file having a decent size color cover image embedded.

(2) Ebooks with less than the three different size cover images.

(3) Ebooks without any cover images stored at all.

Those first two issues are relatively easy to solve, except you have to know where the images are stored for each ebook. The images are stored inside a two number folder structure hierarchy (i.e. .kobo-images\36\120). Some ebooks will share the same folder structure, but most don't, and have folders uniquely theirs. So discovery takes some effort, but once discovered, you can copy the correct size image files to those folders, including over-writing any existing ones, if you wish.

The third issue, is much harder, because you need to know what formula is used to determine those two number folders, because those folders are usually missing on your device, and so you need to create them first, before copying your image files to them.

For all three issues, you need to know the three correct file names. Existing ones makes that easy enough, but for the third issue, you need to check the KoboReader.sqlite file for each specific ebook.

You can of course, just use calibre to do it all for you. I prefer not to, so designed my own helper program, Kobo Cover Fixer, to do all that is required, which took a while to complete, because of that tricky formula. I did eventually think to investigate calibre Python files, and eventually found the right one. And then, because I don't like using Python, especially when sharing things, I converted a cutback version of the relevant portion in the script to a compiled EXE file.

That worked well enough, but I didn't like all the dependencies, so tried to convert to the AutoIt programming language that I use. My first attempt, around 10 months ago, leveraging the use of ChatGPT failed. I tried again more recently, and both ChatGPT and I went real deep, and we eventually succeeded.

I recently fixed all the cover image issues on my Kobo device. That was for over 400 ebooks on my Kobo device (out of over 700).

Anyway, I just wanted to post so some folks could get a heads up. There is a much longer story to all this, but I won't go into that right now.

I will say though, that after fixing all the images, my Kobo actually surprised the hell out of me, by completing a sync, for the first time in many months, probably over a year. That indicates to me, a definite bug in the Kobo device code, which was getting trapped in a never ending Sync loop.