Book cover display problem on Kindle solved

[Tomk2]

It was a minor annoyance. The free ebook of the month from Tor books did not display covers when I emailed them to my Kindle account. I had downloaded the mobi versions from Tor. This month's Tor free ebook was a 40 megabyte file in mobi format, but only a 20 megabyte file in epub. The Tor website was lagging and terribly slow, so I downloaded the epub file and converted it to mobi. The converted mobi file was still around 20 megabytes, half the Tor mobi download file size. I could not see any difference in content with a quick scan on my desktop, so I emailed the smaller mobi file to my kindle account. And it had a cover displayed.

Sooo, I got to thinking that the other books that lacked a cover image could be fixed. I deleted them from my Kindle account. Then I deleted the mobi versions from my software, and recreated the mobi version by converting the epub file. Then I emailed these new mobi files to my kindle account, and each of the five books I did this now displays a cover.

Now I am wondering: Is it always best to download the epub version, and convert epubs to other formats as needed? Apparently true, If you want the cover displayed on a kindle. Has anyone else noticed this?

[tomsem]

I don’t notice missing covers, but I don’t use Cover View on my Kindles. The covers show up on Kindle for iOS/Android/Fire so that is good enough for me.

There is probably some way to side-load the cover images if they are not getting generated as expected when you send Tor’s .mobi to your Kindle account.

[hobnail]

A lot of web sites still talk about mobi like it's the standard. But the azw3 format has more wiggle than the original mobi format with respect to what it can display. Adding to the confusion is that a mobi file can contain both the azw3 formatted book as well as the original mobi formatted book; that's why the mobi was so much bigger. Newer ereaders will use the azw3 format while very old ones that can't use azw3 will use the old/original mobi format.

So if the only options are mobi and epub, I'd get the epub and convert to azw3. But I don't remember the details/restrictions about using the email to kindle feature since I always load books with calibre.

[jhowell]

While an old-style MOBI will show covers when emailed it will lack some of the formatting of the original book and won't allow use of the boldness slider and custom fonts available on newer Kindles.

[Tomk2]

I keep getting error messages when I tried to email in an azw3 file?

[j.p.s]

Originally Posted by Tomk2

I keep getting error messages when I tried to email in an azw3 file?

What you want to email is a dual-mobi from kindlegen or calibre.

[binaryhermit]

Originally Posted by hobnail

Adding to the confusion is that a mobi file can contain both the azw3 formatted book as well as the original mobi formatted book; that's why the mobi was so much bigger

That's probably not actually what was going on, kindegen by default bundles mobi, azw3, and the original epub in a single file. While a dual-mobi is bigger, generally it's not that much bigger.

[j.p.s]

Originally Posted by binaryhermit

That's probably not actually what was going on, kindegen by default bundles mobi, azw3, and the original epub in a single file. While a dual-mobi is bigger, generally it's not that much bigger.

I think that you maybe have not looked at a wide enough variety of books.