Calibre & Covers: Adding books through Calibre vs dragging and dropping?

[VirgoGirl]

Hi!

This is not a problem, I was curious about something in Calibre's behaviour.

I plugged my Glo into Calibre this afternoon to remove and add a few books. About 2/3 of my books show covers on the "Books Details" sidebar in the "Show Card A" window when the title is clicked on. Those are the books I sent over to the SD card via Calibre. The rest are books that I dragged and dropped onto the SD card by way of Windows. Those show a generic brown book in the cover area of the "Books Details" sidebar.

Aside from deleting and resending those books back through Calibre, is there any way to get Calibre to show those book covers when clicked on? I tried refreshing the metadata on the device and the card, but that didn't work. It's not a problem, I don't NEED it to be displayed, I'm just curious if it were possible.

Thanks.

[Sabardeyn]

The short answer: No.

The explanation: If you just dragged & dropped the books through your operating system, you probably only copied the ebook text and not any cover images (which can be a separate file) and even if you did, it might not be in a manner that your reader demands. You also might have old, non-updated metadata within the copied book text on your reader. Calibre's database is updated immediately when editing any books. However, these changes may not be applied to the ebook files themselves because, as a time and workload saver, calibre updates the ebook files upon demand - which usually means export. It can also be triggered by certain plugin actions, for instance Polish Books or the new Editor, among others.

Since you didn't export them via calibre, you can understand why you cannot simply update the files.

This is why, when a user installs calibre for the first time, it requires so many options in Preferences to be set immediately. Otherwise the program could not perform the various actions "behind the scenes" - like converting an ebook for export for use by your reader - correctly.


Now, it might be possible to force calibre to update these ebooks and then copy and paste the new file over the old one. However, if you've got any kind of Antivirus running, this might be considered viral activity. Also, some readers would consider this tampering with a file (ie, DRM'ed ebooks on Kindles and Amazon) and might reject things accordingly. So your best option is probably just to send to your reader, via calibre, normally.

[VirgoGirl]

Thank you for your detailed answer! I didn't think there was a way to do it. I actually prefer dragging and dropping files, the Kobo displays the covers perfectly. It was just the little images weren't there if I browsed the device and card through Calibre.

Thank you again for such a helpful answer!

[eschwartz]

To get metadata (including covers) to show in the Book Details panel in the Device view in calibre:

Right-click on the "Device" icon in the Location Manager, and select "Update cached metadata on device".

This will only work if the book was recognized as matching a book in your library. You can right-click and select "Match book to library" to manually match books, but normally they should be matched if the title and author are the same.

If you have edited the title in order to strip out The Usual Junk, then calibre's metadata will be different from the metadata in the book, and the book will fail to match.

Usually, I'd mention that plugboards also throw a wrench in the matching, but you didn't send them from calibre.

[VirgoGirl]

Originally Posted by eschwartz

To get metadata (including covers) to show in the Book Details panel in the Device view in calibre:

Right-click on the "Device" icon in the Location Manager, and select "Update cached metadata on device".

Ahhhh, did that with both Card A and Device, but it didn't work. No worries, though, isn't important. It's just, well, odd.

[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by VirgoGirl

Ahhhh, did that with both Card A and Device, but it didn't work. No worries, though, isn't important. It's just, well, odd.

Did you make sure all the books match, per the second half of my post?

[VirgoGirl]

They should all match as I ran them through Calibre, saved them to my hard drive and dropped them on the sd card.

[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by VirgoGirl

They should all match as I ran them through Calibre, saved them to my hard drive and dropped them on the sd card.

Oh, so then are you using plugboards to change the title (perhaps to insert series into the title) when you save-to-disk?

In any event, can't hurt to check that the books are indeed being matched as ondevice:true -- if not, then I can't think why the metadata cache wouldn't be updated.

[VirgoGirl]

I added a couple of new books this afternoon, so I selected one of the ebooks without the cover display. I hit "Match book to library", and it came up blank. Thinking "Oh hell, no" I hit search, and it found the book. THEN the cover updated, and a little message said "please update your metadata on the card/device". Which I did. I promptly tried to do it with ALL the ebooks selected, and a little message said "Please select only one book". When I have the time I'll go back and do it for the 1/3 of the books that don't have the display covers.

What I don't understand is this: when I plug in my Kobo, the books that are on my device and card have little check marks on them (cover display) or next to their names (list display) when I'm in one of my libraries. When I look at the card view, little green check marks are next to each title. So why does the "Match book to library" need to be specifically done? I would have thought the little green check mark would imply it found a match.

[eschwartz]

If there are check marks, that implies it was already matched. "Match book to library" is just supposed to put the check marks there.

[VirgoGirl]

That's what *I* thought!

BUT, I'm thinking it maybe forces a reupdate of the metadata?

Another thing I noticed about book covers when I send through calibre vs dragging and dropping: the Kobo renders the covers clearly on Sleep and Powered Off when I send through Calibre.

If I drag and drop, the covers on Sleep are fuzzy (which is cleared up if I go to the main menu while reading the book, then send the reader to sleep) and the Powered Off doesn't render the cover at all (haven't found a fix for that). Something is going on...

[eschwartz]

I know calibre sideloads the cover thumbnails that the Kindle uses in Library view, when using Send-to-device. I don't know anything whatsoever about the Kobo but perhaps there is a similar thumbnail file of some sort for the Kobo, which calibre puts on (and KoboStore would as well) but naturally, sideloaded-over-USB books do not have that done?

Really, this all is what calibre is for. I would just use calibre to sideload.

[davidfor]

There are a few things going on here that aren't completely connected.

Firstly, for epubs and PDF on the Kobo devices, the device generates the cover from the first page of the book. This is used wherever the device needs to display it. If the book is on the main memory, it also saves the cover. The saved cover is read by the driver to display. If the books is on the SD card, the device does not save the generated cover and hence it isn't there for calibre to display.

If you use calibre to sideload the books, there is an option in the Kobo driver to send the cover to the device. The cover is generated at several sizes and put where the device will use it. This works for both the main memory and SD card. The device will use stored cover for books on the SD card, it just doesn't save them there if it does the generation. In this case, calibre should find a cover to display on the device list.

Calibre can also store a cover thumbnail in the file metadata.calibre on the device. This file is used to match the books on the device with the calibre library. When you send a book using calibre, the details are stored in this file to ease the matching when the device is next connected. If a book gets on the device by some other method, calibre will try to match the book if it can and put the details in this file for the future. For books that aren't automatically matched, you can do this manually when viewing the device list using the method eschwartz mentioned.

Sending a cover from calibre will likely look better on the device than letting the device generate it. I think calibre does a slightly better job of doing this, plus it is working from the cover stored in the calibre library rather than generating the first page. The latter might result in a distorted image depending on how the book displays the cover image.

I think that answers the questions raised. But, I won't be surprised if I missed something. Or have explained something badly. I'll be happy to try again if you need it.