iBook covers

[AlexBell]

I routinely test ePub ebooks I've designed in iBooks and in other readers. I've noticed for some time now that the covers work perfect well in other ebook readers they don't work in iBooks library view; a 'generic' cover appears with the same title and author's name and so on.

Covers that I've used in the past for other ebooks show a thumbnail image of the cover I've designed in iBooks, and I'm using the same markup to design the cover page. And the cover page I designed shows up in book view, not Apple's generic cover.

I don't suppose it really matters, but I'd like to know why and how to ensure that my cover shows in library view rather than the generic cover.

[Doitsu]

Originally Posted by AlexBell

I don't suppose it really matters, but I'd like to know why and how to ensure that my cover shows in library view rather than the generic cover.

I've never had any problems with iBooks book covers when I used the default Sigil/Calibre SVG cover image wrapper. I also always mark the cover page using the Add Semantics option in Sigil which'll add the following line to the metadata section of the .opf file:

<meta content="cover.jpg" name="cover" />

and a similar entry to the Guide section.

AFAIK, if you're creating ePub3 books for iBooks, you might have to add some ePub3 specific information, which KevinH's epub3 output plugin will most likely add to the epub.

You may want to double-check that the proper semantics have been applied. They should display Cover and Cover image respectively.

If the cover semantics have been properly defined, there might be something off with the cover image file.

[AlexBell]

Thanks, Doitsu, I'll follow that up.