Do you always use the provided book cover?

[retiredbiker]

Originally Posted by ZodWallop

One of my favorite things about ebooks is the way that it enables midlist authors from the past to bring their books back into print. But these books tend to have awful new covers, while odds are that the original book had a beautiful (or beautifully lurid) painted cover. That was what sold these midlist books.

Those are almost always changed by me.

I agree, and there are a lot NOT back in print, maybe never will be. I do my own OCR on stuff from Internet Archive, for instance. Many have lovely old covers. And if there are several good covers, I'll add an "Alt Covers" file into the book to hold them. Even stories from magazines may have been in several magazines! And magazine serials automatically have several covers.

I love to see the old, often lurid, covers on the PC as I make and proof a book, but hardly notice them on a Kobo or Kindle with the ugly muddy grey display.

[ownedbycats]

Originally Posted by ZodWallop

One of my favorite things about ebooks is the way that it enables midlist authors from the past to bring their books back into print. But these books tend to have awful new covers, while odds are that the original book had a beautiful (or beautifully lurid) painted cover. That was what sold these midlist books.

Those are almost always changed by me.

Old cover, when the book was published by HarperCollins:


New cover, when the author published on Kindle:


Yeah, I prefer the old one.

[hobnail]

Originally Posted by DNSB

Have you looked at ImageWorsener? Basic setting would be -grayscale and -depthgray 4 (or -depthcc 16). I did a batch file that basically runs the input file through various dithering algorithms and then eyeball them since oddly enough, I find that some images look better with different dithering algorithms.

As to why the name ImageWorsener? To quote the documentation:

Thanks. Another one that occurred to me after my posting is the ai art programs that can convert a photo to something, e.g., https://goart.fotor.com/. It looks like it's reducing the colors, sort of like it was made with Illustrator.

[Catlady]

Like a few others, I will change the cover to match a paper version I own or remember. If a series changed the cover style partway through, I generally like to make them consistent.

[fduniho]

No, if my ebooks already work with my ereader, I don't bother with editing them in calibre.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by ownedbycats

Do you always use the book cover provided by the publisher, or do you sometimes use covers from different editions?

(Excluding more generic covers like those godawful Project Gutenberg ones.)

I do sometimes replace a US cover with a UK cover if I like the UK cover better enough.

[Paperbackstash]

I used to change some to favorites, but Amazon then goes and updates / changes them back anyway half the time, which is very irritating. I haven't had calibre for about 2 years now, so haven't been messing with any of that.

[4691mls]

I wouldn't even know how to change the cover. I don't really care anyway since it's just a tiny little square on a black-and-white epub ereader.

[Fiat_Lux]

Originally Posted by Quoth

I
Covers are adverts or part of adverts. Adverts are not covered by copyright in the same way (you can't re-use for some other product).

When I was in art school, one of the things that was hammered into us, was that the underlying theme of a series of advertisements, as well as the individual advertisements were under copyright.

I don't remember the name of the case, but we called it "black with red blob". A series of pretty good adds for a company in London, England. The original add agency was fired, and their new agency created a second series based on that theme. And both companies (the client, and the add agency) ended up paying a hefty amount for the copyright violations of the second series.

I am not a lawyer. This isn't legal advice.

[Fiat_Lux]

Originally Posted by issybird

I mostly can’t be bothered, although sometimes I change those awful generic Penguin ones that only have the bird with no title, no author.

When I was first told about those Penguin covers, I thought the person was joking. It was only after I bought a Penguin ebook, that I realised that Penguin put no thought into its ebook covers.

Between Wiki Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page) and the create a cover function in Calibre, I ended with a very attractive cover for the ebook.

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by Fiat_Lux

I don't remember the name of the case, but we called it "black with red blob". A series of pretty good adds for a company in London, England. The original add agency was fired, and their new agency created a second series based on that theme. And both companies (the client, and the add agency) ended up paying a hefty amount for the copyright violations of the second series.

I'm not sure if it is related or not, but in the US you can copy trade dress. Back in the '80's Epic Comics put out a nice collection of Moebius graphic novels.

But they skipped some of his black and white erotic stuff inspired by the American underground comics. So Dark Horse comics put out two collections, The Horny Goof and... I forget the other one. But they mimicked the Epic comics trade dress and were numbered 0 and 1/2.

[PredicateD]

I always use the existing cover. In fact, it never even occurred to me to try to change a cover and I'm not sure I'd ever bother to do it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[Tarana]

I change covers if I don't like them or if they are generic. I always change covers on books I purchased to replace a beloved paperback copy.

[isarl]

Originally Posted by haertig

Of most importance to me are the covers when I have a series. I want to be able to visually recognize a series as a series. So I search out covers of the same style so the series matches.

I relate to this. The Foundation series has a relatively recent, geometric series of matching designs, and then the cover on the first novel had to go and get replaced with a TV series tie-in design instead. Tracking down the geometric design that was replaced, and in satisfactory resolution, was quite a pain.

Originally Posted by retired biker

And if there are several good covers, I'll add an "Alt Covers" file into the book to hold them. Even stories from magazines may have been in several magazines! And magazine serials automatically have several covers.

I love finding new ideas for how to improve my Calibre library. Thank you for this!

[Colonel Cathcart]

Originally Posted by retiredbiker

...And if there are several good covers, I'll add an "Alt Covers" file into the book to hold them.

Interesting idea. Does Calibre support alt covers?