iPad Question about iBooks and book covers

[sahmad88]

I am not sure if this is a question about what iTunes is doing, or how epubs hand artwork. So I apologize in advance if this question is in the wrong forum.

I put all my non-DRM epubs into iBooks and I can't figure out how to get the artwork to show up. I like the bookshelf display of books in iBooks, but if you can't see the artwork and all you see is small thumbnail of a page with some text and perhaps a very small picture, then it is hard, if not impossible, to figure out which book is which. About half of my ebooks have this problem. I have gone into iTunes and updated the artwork. It displays fine in coverflow in iTunes. I have deleted the books off of my iPad and my iTunes library and resynced everything, and still the new book covers won't show up. Other than that, I really like the iBooks software.

I love the two page view and even though there is no option to go white text on black, the brightness can be turned down enough that I can read in the middle of the night without glare and without waking up my husband. I just wish I could get this option to work. Any ideas? Thanks.

[scottjl]

if you have a graphic image you'd like to use for the cover of a book, go into itunes, books, and select the book you want to cover. get information on it (control-i or command-i) and go to the last tab (artwork i believe, going on memory here) and paste it into there, or open the image file.

if you manage your epub files in a tool like calibre, you can select artwork when you edit the meta information. it will even search for cover art for you. apparently there is some issue with the program though. if you have the book already converted to epub format, and then add a cover, it will not embed it into the epub file. you have to recreate or resave the epub file to get the graphic stored in there from calibre.

hope this helps!

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by sahmad88

I put all my non-DRM epubs into iBooks and I can't figure out how to get the artwork to show up.

You can add the artwork manually in iTunes. Unfortunately, iBooks requires the use of a meta data entry identifying the graphic that's used for the cover, and not all ePubs have such an entry.

No doubt in future nearly all ePubs will make sure that they have this metadata entry, even though it's not a requirement of the ePub spec, just to get nice behaviour in iTunes/iBooks.

[sahmad88]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

You can add the artwork manually in iTunes. Unfortunately, iBooks requires the use of a meta data entry identifying the graphic that's used for the cover, and not all ePubs have such an entry.

No doubt in future nearly all ePubs will make sure that they have this metadata entry, even though it's not a requirement of the ePub spec, just to get nice behaviour in iTunes/iBooks.

This was the answer, thank you! I had to go to Calibre and re-convert the books to epub. Not too big a deal. It wasn't enough to go into iTunes and add the cover art there, and it wasn't enough to just add the cover art into Calibre. I had to actually choose to convert the books to epub again, even though they were already in epub. Thanks again. Now my bookshelf looks pretty

[LizzieLynne]

Apologies for resurrecting a year old post, however I thought it appropriate to ask my question here as it's been partially answered.

Originally Posted by scottjl

If you manage your epub files in a tool like calibre, you can select artwork when you edit the meta information. it will even search for cover art for you. apparently there is some issue with the program though. if you have the book already converted to epub format, and then add a cover, it will not embed it into the epub file. you have to recreate or resave the epub file to get the graphic stored in there from calibre.

So far, I've added 316 epubs to Calibre. I wasn't 100% happy with many of the covers for my older books (I'm picky/OCD about that! ) and updated them manually. I loaded a few books on my iPad last night and saw that the covers were not embedded and not showing up in iBooks.

By recreating or saving, as stated above, does this mean I need to convert individually (or in bulk) an existing epub into an epub again? Please, oh please tell me there is an easier way to embed the cover in the metadata!

In Calibre preferences I have "Save Covers Separately" checked. Should this be checked? What are the pros and cons of this feature?

Thanks for your help,
Lizzie