Book cover mystery

[jsundman]

Apologies if this topic is covered elsewhere or if I'm posting to the wrong place. This is my first post-introduction post.

Using Calibre I converted a book yesterday from .ODT (open office) to Epub and Mobi. The books appear to be properly formatted, yay. I used the metadata editor to specify a cover, and that shows up in the Calibre pane.

But when I open the book to read it in the ebook reader, the cover is wrong. It just shows a glyph (my logo) blown up to fill the cover space. Not sure where it's grabbing that logo from, but it's wrong, obviously. Somehow the reader isn't finding the cover.

When I open the book up and click on the metadata.opf file I get a failure, with the following message:

calibre, version 2.60.0
ERROR: Could not open ebook: Failed to read book, /Users/johnsundman/Dropbox/Calibre Library/John Sundman/Biodigital - free version for mail list subscribers (31)/metadata.opf click "Show Details" for more information

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "site-packages/calibre/utils/ipc/simple_worker.py", line 274, in main
File "site-packages/calibre/ebooks/oeb/iterator/book.py", line 62, in extract_book
File "site-packages/calibre/customize/conversion.py", line 241, in __call__
File "site-packages/calibre/ebooks/conversion/plugins/html_input.py", line 83, in convert
File "site-packages/calibre/ebooks/conversion/plumber.py", line 1258, in create_oebbook
File "site-packages/calibre/ebooks/oeb/reader.py", line 71, in __call__
File "site-packages/calibre/ebooks/oeb/reader.py", line 696, in _all_from_opf
File "site-packages/calibre/ebooks/oeb/reader.py", line 343, in _spine_from_opf
OEBError: Spine is empty

Any guidance appreciated.

Thanks!

jrs

[DaveFalcon73]

Hmmm, so maybe the cover image is too large? I've noticed most cover images are 500 pixels wide by 767 pixels tall so before editing the metadata for the ebook I shrink any image to that dimensions and save it and it shows up fine.

Once you've edited/resized the cover image, open Calibre and right click the ebook and EDIT METADATA then SINGULARLY.

Here you'll see the cover image that's in your book, if you copy the image (usually I do it from my graphics program) and then right click the image in the EDIT METADATA window and then PASTE, then click OK it then updates the cover correctly in the ebook.

You can then verify this by right clicking on the ebook and EDIT BOOK and on the left under the FILES BROWSER if you scroll down you should see under the IMAGES section COVER.JPG and it's got an icon next to it. If you see this then it should be okay (providing you sized the image correctly).

I usually convert the ebooks to MOBI and drag them into my Kindle and the covers then appear fine there. Not tried in EPUB format.

[theducks]

<not sure if this is your issue> The (source) file name is absurdly long (and has spaces)


a 'cover' has 2 parts:
The HTML page it is on , that part seems to be there or you would not see the broken image icon

the image file (jpg, png...). most likely, this is missing or the path name is in error. It is case sensitive, (many devices) abhors spaces in the file name

If you had used the tool with the calibre editor, this should have been fine.

(editor) Tools: Add Cover:<choose>

The cover can be huge (anything over 800x600 is huge to my devices ), as long as it is a valid format

[dwig]

Originally Posted by jsundman

...
Using Calibre I converted a book yesterday from .ODT (open office) to Epub and Mobi. The books appear to be properly formatted, yay. I used the metadata editor to specify a cover, and that shows up in the Calibre pane.

But when I open the book to read it in the ebook reader, the cover is wrong. It just shows a glyph (my logo) blown up to fill the cover space. Not sure where it's grabbing that logo from, but it's wrong, obviously. Somehow the reader isn't finding the cover.
...

I can't help with the error message but the behavior you list with the cover is normal.

Calibre NEVER displays the cover that is inside of an ebook. Instead, it uses a JPEG image stored beside the ebook. When an ebook is imported, Calibre extracts a copy of its cover, if there is one, and generates the cover.jpg that it then uses. When you "add a cover" using the metadata editor you are adding or changing the cover.jpg that Calibre uses but you are not actually adding or changing the cover in the ebook itself.

There are a number of actions in Calibre that you can use to insert the new altered cover into the ebook itself, provided the ebook's format allows such action. Changing the workflow so that you edit the metadata and add a cover BEFORE converting to another format will allow Calibre to incorporate the metadata edits and cover (where supported) in the resulting converted ebook.