Can I use "Save to disk" and updat the cover?

pwarning · 03-21-2010, 10:06 PM

I have a collection of ebooks on my desktop computer organized through Calibre (which is great by the way!) in epub format. I've updated the metadata and covers so everything is correct. I understand the metadata and covers aren't stored in the original files and I'm fine with that. But I do most of my reading on my netbook so I'm trying to save my files to disk and then copy them to my netbook. In the Preferences I have "Update metadata in saved copies" checked and it appears the metadata gets updated perfectly when saving but the cover doesn't get changed. I can save the cover separately but that doesn't help as my ebook program reads the cover from the epub, not the jpeg. So I have current metadata but old covers (or no covers) and not the new ones I set up in Calibre.

I could go into each epub archive and manually update the cover.jpg but I'd rather not do that. Isn't there some way in Calibre to replace the cover in the file that I'm saving to disk?

kovidgoyal · 03-21-2010, 11:28 PM

covers are not updated in epub files, this is a limitation of the epub format, which doesn't really have a concept of cover, instead epub viewers just use the first file in the epub as a cover.

When converting calibre inserts a cover into the beginning of the file, but not when setting metadata, as this would cause problems, for instance setting metadata on the same file twice would mean you end up with two cover pages in the EPUB.

03-21-2010, 10:06 PM	#1
pwarning Junior Member Posts: 1 Karma: 10 Join Date: Mar 2010 Device: none	Can I use "Save to disk" and update the cover? I have a collection of ebooks on my desktop computer organized through Calibre (which is great by the way!) in epub format. I've updated the metadata and covers so everything is correct. I understand the metadata and covers aren't stored in the original files and I'm fine with that. But I do most of my reading on my netbook so I'm trying to save my files to disk and then copy them to my netbook. In the Preferences I have "Update metadata in saved copies" checked and it appears the metadata gets updated perfectly when saving but the cover doesn't get changed. I can save the cover separately but that doesn't help as my ebook program reads the cover from the epub, not the jpeg. So I have current metadata but old covers (or no covers) and not the new ones I set up in Calibre. I could go into each epub archive and manually update the cover.jpg but I'd rather not do that. Isn't there some way in Calibre to replace the cover in the file that I'm saving to disk? Last edited by pwarning; 03-21-2010 at 10:14 PM. Reason: I apparently can't spell "update" in the title. Sorry!

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03-21-2010, 11:28 PM	#2
kovidgoyal creator of calibre Posts: 43,843 Karma: 22666666 Join Date: Oct 2006 Location: Mumbai, India Device: Various	covers are not updated in epub files, this is a limitation of the epub format, which doesn't really have a concept of cover, instead epub viewers just use the first file in the epub as a cover. When converting calibre inserts a cover into the beginning of the file, but not when setting metadata, as this would cause problems, for instance setting metadata on the same file twice would mean you end up with two cover pages in the EPUB.

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