Cover discrepancy on ePUb and Kindle

[stevelitt]

Hi everyone,

I'm making a one source converter from Bluefish authored multichapter well formed Xhtml to ePub, and I want the ePub to be convertable to Kindle specifications via kindlegen. But there's a problem. Here's the Kindle authoring specification: https://kindlegen.s3.amazonaws.com/A...Guidelines.pdf.

Section 3.2 specifies three methods to incorporate a cover, but two of the ways result in a no-cover ePub, at least as viewed by the ebook-viewer software that comes with Calibre.

The only method in section 3.2 that comes close to working in both Kindle and ePub was described in an exception in 3.2.3, where you put the cover image in an Xhtml file, include that file in the metadata, manifest, spine and guide of the OPF file. This gives the cover in both formats, but if you do it according to Kindle specs, the ePub's cover appears at the end of the book, not the beginning. If you break Kindle's rules and in the Spine say linear="yes", it also appears in the front of the ePub, and appears to have no bad effects on the Kindle Mobi (made by converting the ePub via kindlegen).

I could kludge up something that writes an ePub, then changes linear="yes" to "no", and writes another ePub exclusively for kindle generation. But before I do that, I figured I'd ask you guys if you have a better solution.

Would it be a bad idea for me to cross post this question to the Kindle Formats forum?

Thanks,

SteveT

[DaleDe]

It is wrong to cross post. That being said this is clearly a Kindle question and should have been put in the Kindle forum to begin with. Generally just create an ePub that works like you want and then use KindleGen. It will do the right thing. Kindle Previewer also uses KindleGen so it will also work.

I will move this to the correct forum.

Dale

[Simon_M]

Hi Steve! Your cover image should indeed be in an XHTML file, and placed as the first item in the <spine> with linear="no".

Kindle software won't pick it up from there, though, it will get it from the <guide> at the bottom of the OPF, where one of your lines should be something like:

<reference type="cover" title="Cover" href="xhtml/cover.xhtml"/>

If I recall correctly, in the case of fixed-format (KF8 fixed-format specifically), any non-linear spine items appear at the end of the book, and there is no way around that that I know of.

The cover.xhtml file itself can be styled using a responsive percentage height (or width for landscape shaped books), which will be ignored by Kindle but maxxed out to full page size anyway (a bug, in essence, but handily gives the same result).

[Doitsu]

Originally Posted by Simon_M

Kindle software won't pick it up from there, though, it will get it from the <guide> at the bottom of the OPF, where one of your lines should be something like:

<reference type="cover" title="Cover" href="xhtml/cover.xhtml"/>

Note that this method only works if you use Calibre. KindleGen does not support XHTML cover pages and will only use the image referenced in the XHTML cover page, if it has been defined as such either:

in the <metadata> section of the .opf file:

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

or in the <manifest> section:

<item href="Images/cover.jpg" id="cover.jpg" media-type="image/jpeg" properties="cover-image" />

[Simon_M]

Originally Posted by Doitsu

Note that this method only works if you use Calibre. KindleGen does not support XHTML cover pages and will only use the image referenced in the XHTML cover page, if it has been defined as such either:

in the <metadata> section of the .opf file:

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

Oop - my bad - we've had this line in the HTML template for so long I forgot about it! Very important - and this is also needed to get iBooks to display the book cover in the bookshelf view, so definitely include it.