Possible suggestion on getting Nook Color to recognize covers

[jackie_w]

I don't have a Nook so this post may be completely irrelevant, but I offer it as another line of enquiry.

I had a similar problem getting my PocketBook 360 to reliably display EPUB cover thumbnails. Sometimes they were OK, sometimes no cover displayed at all and sometimes a random image from the EPUB displayed.

To cut a long story short, I eventually tracked down the problem to the EPUB's content.opf file <manifest> section and how far down the list the cover item appeared, i.e. the calibre-created line

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

If it was lower than about the 50th item then I didn't get a correct cover thumbnail. If I manually moved it up to be the first item in the manifest then it worked perfectly every time. This is obviously a problem with the PocketBook firmware not calibre.

Apologies if this is a complete red herring for you Nook folks, but I felt I should mention it just in case.

[Edit:] I should also add that resending the tweaked EPUB to the PocketBook was not enough, I had to delete the EPUB from the PocketBook first before resending as the thumbnail extraction seemed to happen only once on initial send.

[kovidgoyal]

@leday: Is the actual cover file in the EPUB cover.jpg or cover.jpeg?

[leday]

I have both in there. I had to add the cover.jpg manually though, as the cover.jpeg was already there but that one alone didn't work. Then I added

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

to the manifest in the opf file. I did NOT change or delete the <item href="cover.jpeg" id="cover" media-type="image/jpeg"/> line that was already in the manifest.

[kovidgoyal]

then the problem is the nook doesn't recognize the .jpeg extension for the cover. You should report that to B&N, hopefully they will fix that soon.

[leday]

OK. I'll see about letting them know. Thanks.

[leday]

FYI...I already received a response from B&N when I contacted them about the cover issue this morning. This is the response:

"Thank you for your email regarding the NOOKcolor not recognize the cover
of sideloaded content.

We are aware of this problem and are working diligently to resolve it.
Please check back often as we hope to correct this situation shortly
with the update for NOOKcolor.

Please accept our sincere apologies for any inconvenience this may have
caused."

[kovidgoyal]

Hopefully, they mean what they say

[icon0clast]

I was really starting to buy into the jpg vs. jpeg theory, until I exploded the User_Guide.epub that comes installed on the device. It uses jpeg throughout, including here:
<item id="cover" href="images/userguide_cover_fmt.jpeg" media-type="image/jpeg"/>

I guess there's nothing to do but hope they have it fixed in the 2.2 release.

[leday]

I was hooked into it too, until I found this fix in the B&N Nook thread....post #64

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...75#post1260075

What it amounts to is all you have to do is go into Calibre's preferences, click on "saving books to devices button, add "My Files/Books/" to the template pathway so that it reads

My Files/Books/{author_sort}/{title}/{title} - {authors}

and then all I have to do is just reconvert the books epub-to-epub and that works like a charm for me. I have used this now on many books with no problems at all. No more rigamarole of having to adjust the opf files or copy/add jpg files.

Go figure...

[kovidgoyal]

calibre should already be putting files int My Files/Books when sending the to the main memory of the Nook Color.

[leday]

Maybe so, but the NC wasn't recognizing the covers at all, even after an epub-to-epub reconvert, until I (and others according to the thread I mentioned above) put those lines into the template command.

[rboatright]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

calibre should already be putting files int My Files/Books when sending the to the main memory of the Nook Color.

perhaps it does, but if you load to the sdcard, it puts them in the root of the card instead of /My Files/Books

[kovidgoyal]

Originally Posted by rboatright

perhaps it does, but if you load to the sdcard, it puts them in the root of the card instead of /My Files/Books

And is the problem specific to books sent to the sd card versus books sent to the main memory?

[leday]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

And is the problem specific to books sent to the sd card versus books sent to the main memory?

I suppose not, as I have not used any SD cards and all my books are sent to main memory.

[MikeDiaz]

Kovid

When sideloading books to the NC uSD card via Calibre the books get dumped in the root instead of myfiles/books. consequently the books don't show up in the library. Not sure if dumping the books in the proper folders would solve the issue.

Can this be tweaked in a future update?

thanks