Hi Loeffel,
The decision to limit the Copy Cover plugin to a single cover was deliberate on my part. I wanted it to be usable by anyone, even the most non-technical users. I thought (rightly or wrongly) that copying multiple images (with book names) was likely to end up as a file housekeeping problem as the reader filled up with covers. Not all users are comfortable using a file browser to manually delete files.
In addition, the way it is set up now means you only have to tell your reader (Sony/PocketBook) once where to find the standby/poweroff image and then it's configured forever, or at least, for as long as you want it to be. Each new cover is copied to the same place and the reader is none the wiser that anything has changed.
In principal, I would be happy to add other devices to the plugin if they can work within this framework:-
- Device has a specific named directory where the cover will always be copied. With the Sonys that could have been any directory but I chose the main Sony image directory, which so far is the same for all models. PocketBook only has one directory where poweroff images can be stored.
- Calibre is able to automatically detect which device is connected so the user doesn't have to manually tell the plugin. I'm sure Calibre can do this for most devices.
- I need to know what image format the device expects. Sony is not very fussy so I use the standard Calibre cover.jpg file. PocketBook 360 is fussy - it expects a greyscale 4BPP bmp.
- User is given the choice to retain the aspect ratio as this is a must-have for some users.
When it comes to adding the Kindle the biggest problem would be that I don't have one, have never even seen one and have no way of getting access to one. Therefore testing would be a problem. From what you've said about jailbreaking and needing to force a reset after disconnecting, testing would be doubly important.
Have you already created code which can, from within Calibre,
- detect whether the attached Kindle is already jailbroken?
- detect whether the screensaver mod is installed?
- force the reset?
If the answer to all 3 is yes then I guess a collaborative effort could be possible, but only if Kovid was happy with the jailbreak thing.
However, I don't want to pursue the 'copy many covers' option at this point. If that's the most important feature for you then I would suggest you proceed with a completely separate plugin.
If you want to reuse any of my (very beginners level) Python code, feel free. Please also be aware that the existing Copy Cover plugin is written as an old-style Calibre plugin. If you're writing a new one then it should be the new-style
as referenced in this thread. I'm in the process of looking at converting to the new-style but lack of experience means I'm a bit slow.
Regards, Jackie