[Metadata Source Plugin] Kindle (Amazon) High-res Covers

[Dopedangel]

Originally Posted by Nicolas F

I don't know wich version you tried, the one in the post you cited is not the latest. lbschenkel made a new one that scrapes goodreads to find the ASIN. It can find more covers (but it will also find more covers in the wrong language)

I used the one you posted I have not tried the other one yet. Will try it out later once I have time. Though why would I need 1200x2100 covers when I mostly read on 600x800 reader

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Dopedangel

I used the one you posted I have not tried the other one yet. Will try it out later once I have time. Though why would I need 1200x2100 covers when I mostly read on 600x800 reader

I download the large cover and use that. In the Calibre editor, I reduce the size of the cover to 1600 lines. Now I know you don't currently need such a large cover even at 1600 lines. But, if you read on a tablet or buy a new hi-res Reader, you will want your covers to be hi-res or they will end up being fuzzy.

[lbschenkel]

Originally Posted by Nicolas F

I don't know wich version you tried, the one in the post you cited is not the latest. lbschenkel made a new one that scrapes goodreads to find the ASIN. It can find more covers (but it will also find more covers in the wrong language)

I had an idea. I will make the plug-in make a note of which language the edition that the Goodreads ID or ISBN points to and only fetch covers for Kindle editions that are in the same language.

(I cannot use the language of the book because Calibre does not pass that information to plug-ins when downloading covers.)

[lbschenkel]

Originally Posted by Nicolas F

It could be interesting to scrape the other languages amazon websites since goodreads have a very good database of english titles but isn't has good for foreign editions (searching for french titles in my case). But I haven't included it in what I coded. It could be done with an option to chose which stores to use.

Honestly I'm not so fond of that idea. I was on the fence regarding doing scraping in the first place, but since you took the initiative of contributing with an initial implementation I decided move forward — but maintaining code to scrape all the different Amazon local sites is not something I really look forward to.

I will be more open to the idea if somebody like yourself volunteers to be the maintainer for the Amazon scraping code for each local website. I could keep this code in separate source files to make it easier for others to maintain it, and make each local store an option that you must explicitly opt-in, as you said. Then any issues with Amazon won't affect the default configuration, nor slow down the cover lookup.

What do you think?

[Nicolas F]

Originally Posted by lbschenkel

I had an idea. I will make the plug-in make a note of which language the edition that the Goodreads ID or ISBN points to and only fetch covers for Kindle editions that are in the same language.

(I cannot use the language of the book because Calibre does not pass that information to plug-ins when downloading covers.)

The only problem with this is that the language isn't always accurate on goodreads (a lot of books are marked as English even though they are in another language). Another solution is to check if the title for the book you found correspond to the title in calibre.

[Dopedangel]

Maybe ask Kovid if he would be willing to open language metadata for plugins. Or it could be defined by the user that this is the default language for all their books so your plugin should look only for those. I only have English books in my library so the plugin shouldn't show me other language covers

[FizzyWater]

Thanks so much for this!

I have a question, and I acknowledge that I probably should already know this, but like many folks on the forum, I have multiple readers. If I create an ePub or awz3 using one of these high-res versions, but end up wanting to read on one of the older readers, will Calibre convert it to a size that fits the reader when I send it to the reader? I would I need to make a second copy with a smaller-res sized photo?

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by FizzyWater

Thanks so much for this!

I have a question, and I acknowledge that I probably should already know this, but like many folks on the forum, I have multiple readers. If I create an ePub or awz3 using one of these high-res versions, but end up wanting to read on one of the older readers, will Calibre convert it to a size that fits the reader when I send it to the reader? I would I need to make a second copy with a smaller-res sized photo?

The cover shown is not the cover in the eBook. If you are creating a KF8 eBook for an older Kindle, you don't have to worry about a hi-res cover as the book doesn't open at the cover.

If the older device handles ePub, then yes, I would make a smaller cover as you can get a severe slowdown or crash.

[lbschenkel]

Originally Posted by FizzyWater

Thanks so much for this!

I have a question, and I acknowledge that I probably should already know this, but like many folks on the forum, I have multiple readers. If I create an ePub or awz3 using one of these high-res versions, but end up wanting to read on one of the older readers, will Calibre convert it to a size that fits the reader when I send it to the reader? I would I need to make a second copy with a smaller-res sized photo?

I don't know what device you have, but if you're referring to the Kindle there are two covers: the one shown in the home screen and the one embedded in the book. If you're referring to the latter, when you send the book to the device Calibre won't change the contents of the book (to the best of my knowledge) so you're going to have the cover in whichever resolution was in effect by the output profile you used during the conversion.

Unless you have a really ancient device, I wouldn't worry about it. Most devices should automatically downscale the cover to fit the screen.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by lbschenkel

Unless you have a really ancient device, I wouldn't worry about it. Most devices should automatically downscale the cover to fit the screen.

I've been noticing a lot of covers are coming with about 1600 lines. This is hi-res. The problem is these older devices that are 800x600 don't have enough working memory. These Readers don't work all that well with hi-res graphics. Also, some of these Readers have a slower processor and with the slower processor and less system RAM, they either run very slowly when displaying hi-res graphics or they crash. This has nothing to do with scaling the graphics to fit the screen. The graphics have to be fully loaded before being displayed.

[DoctorOhh]

@lbschenkel Thank you for creating this plugin. I have been using it for 11 months now and it consistently makes high resolution covers available for most books I want to add a cover to. I noticed that it was not in the Index of Plugins. So I added this plugin so others can find it.

If you wish any of the wording in the Index changed let any Calibre forum moderator (list of moderators at bottom of main calibre forum) know and we will correct it.

[lbschenkel]

Originally Posted by DoctorOhh

@lbschenkel Thank you for creating this plugin. I have been using it for 11 months now and it consistently makes high resolution covers available for most books I want to add a cover to. I noticed that it was not in the Index of Plugins. So I added this plugin so others can find it.

If you wish any of the wording in the Index changed let any Calibre forum moderator (list of moderators at bottom of main calibre forum) know and we will correct it.

Thank you for that. I plan to do some minor clean ups in the near future and bump the version to 1.0. I have no big changes planned, the current implementation seems to work acceptably well as it is.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by lbschenkel

Thank you for that. I plan to do some minor clean ups in the near future and bump the version to 1.0. I have no big changes planned, the current implementation seems to work acceptably well as it is.

Just saying thanks for the plugin. Between your plugin and qsxwdc's modified version of the Kobo Metadata plugin, I can find decent resolution covers for almost all my books.

[Ascobis]

tl;dr
Thank you for this awesome plugin.

[mjart]

it looks like most of the post for this plugin were several years ago, but I just wanted to thank you for putting the work in to creating the plugin. It worked great and relieved my frustration at fuzzy irregular book covers. Thank you sooooo much. The few books it didn't automatically come up with a cover for I just went in to amazon, found the correct ASIN # and then the hgh-rez covers poped up. It worked just as well for my Amazon books as it did for my books obtained else where. Great Job!