Kindle passes cover by

[sheygetz]

While on my Sony a new epub will open to the cover, when converted to AZW3 it will open to the TOC on my Paperwhite.

Most of my AZW3 files are converted by Calibre, not Amazon-bought ones. Is it possibel to change this behavior in general for the epub to AZW3 conversion process? Or only by editing every single file (which I wouldn't do, too much hassle). Would a conversion to mobi instead help any, i.e. open to the cover?

[eschwartz]

both mobi and azw3 use a semantic tag "start" to define where the "Beginning" entry in the ToC goes to. You can see this in Sigil, or by manually examining the toc.ncx of the epub. You can probably use calibre's search and replace option within the conversion process to strip this out and add it into the cover entry.

[kovidgoyal]

You cannot. There is no way to get a Kindle to open at the cover, short of adding an extra copy of the cover as a regular image at the start of the book. I have no idea why amazon designed their MOBI/AZW3 readers like this, but they did.

[sheygetz]

Thank you. I understand it I got firm NOs to all my questions.
* It is not possible to setup the Calibre conversion so it would always change Amazon's start / beginning token to point to the cover.
* It does not matter whether I convert to mobi or AZW3.

Tough luck

[krbo]

Originally Posted by sheygetz

While on my Sony a new epub will open to the cover, when converted to AZW3 it will open to the TOC on my Paperwhite.

Most of my AZW3 files are converted by Calibre, not Amazon-bought ones. Is it possibel to change this behavior in general for the epub to AZW3 conversion process? Or only by editing every single file (which I wouldn't do, too much hassle). Would a conversion to mobi instead help any, i.e. open to the cover?

It is possible to trick all Kindle models since K3 to show cover on first open.
(as Kovid mentioned)

Can't be auto function of Calibre but is very easy if you are converting from epub.

And existing AZW3 can be edited with Calibre.


"Cover" you get will not be full screen - it will be like any book picture with margins all over it (on Kindle go left of it to see a full size cover) but it is OK for me and every my book in last 2 years now opens on cover.

I already wrote here about epub to azw3 with cover open:

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...64#post2588764


Editing existing AZW3 will require import of skeleton cover.html page with SVG structure, editing it with your cover picture data and then adding in metadata.opf in <guide> part following:

<reference href="text/cover.html" type="title-page" title="Title Page"/>

(With Calibre editor of course, after save&quit calibre will properly rename html parts)



And yes, it is really crazy Amazon software team can't understand that everywhere we go first we see on a book is a cover, front and back.

But that is just a fraction of their strange ideas.


If I have knowledge I'll add right click menu option in Calibre book editor "Start book with this picture"