calibre 7.11: support for adding thumbnails for Kindle Scribe

[RKrueger]

Just did a file sync with my Scribe in 7.12 and the thumbnails for newly added books compressed into a square shape. Anyone else experience this?

[OuyangZhu]

Originally Posted by RKrueger

Just did a file sync with my Scribe in 7.12 and the thumbnails for newly added books compressed into a square shape. Anyone else experience this?

Are you windows, or macOS or linux?

[axu2]

Originally Posted by jackm8

Great that progress is made in this area. Any ideas on how it's achieved? I've nothing against Calibre, it's great program, but I just organise things on my own, and rarely use it. Changing covers is something that I often do, so I'm interested in the process.

It’s copying a jpg with a certain name to the system/thumbnails folder on the scribe.

[iskiros]

Originally Posted by RKrueger

Just did a file sync with my Scribe in 7.12 and the thumbnails for newly added books compressed into a square shape. Anyone else experience this?

Same for me. Calibre 7.12 and Ubuntu Linux

[RKrueger]

Originally Posted by OuyangZhu

Are you windows, or macOS or linux?

I am on MacOS 14.5.

[tomsem]

Originally Posted by OuyangZhu

I'm windows 11 and kindle scribe, I tried to use calibre 7.11 to send the file to my kindle scribe, however it did not work, the book cover did not not exsit in my library list as the calibre version before.

If your Scribe recently updated, it might not have had the update which changed it into an MTP device when you tried it before. But all recent updates make this change. Until this update, calibre did not send cover thumbnails to any MTP device.

If you meant 'sent via email' (send to kindle service) you need to send ePub (with a cover) to get cover thumbnails. PDFs that get converted to Print Replica format will not have cover thumbnails after downloading.

I just had a chance to test with W11 and calibre 7.11. It works as expected with AZW3, and cover thumbnail appears in Library. Again, if you send PDF it will not have a cover thumbnail. Kindles don't support that.

[Otter]

Originally Posted by RKrueger

Just did a file sync with my Scribe in 7.12 and the thumbnails for newly added books compressed into a square shape. Anyone else experience this?

I just tried on 7.12 and got the same result...square shaped thumbnail, maybe half the height of regular ones next to it.

[tomsem]

Originally Posted by Otter

I just tried on 7.12 and got the same result...square shaped thumbnail, maybe half the height of regular ones next to it.

I have seen this a few times, but they always assume the expected height after some time elapses.

[grizedale]

Originally Posted by Otter

I just tried on 7.12 and got the same result...square shaped thumbnail, maybe half the height of regular ones next to it.

Same here, see screenshot, showing covers before update and the one after (Service Model).

[tomsem]

I had one squarish thumbnail, checked it in calibre and sure enough its thumbnail was square there as well. I updated the thumbnail and connected to send the fixed thumbnail.

But after calibre synced all of the side loaded books now have square cover thumbnails. It turns out that all of the cover thumbnails in the amazon-cover-bug folder are square! Calibre 'restored' these on reconnect, overwriting the rectangular ones.

So after removing the side loaded books, re-sending some new ones, and removing amazon-cover-bug folder, I once again have rectangular thumbnails.

I would need to rebuild the book with square thumbnail it seems, changing metadata had no effect.

It must still be the case Kovid does not have a Scribe to test on.

[jhowell]

Kovid committed a fix for the square thumbnail problem several days ago: MTP driver: Preserve cover aspect ratio for thumbnail generation. Fixes #2067755 Thumbnails for Kindle Scribe are resized and look weird (https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/2067755) so it should be in the next release of calibre.