fun (not) with kindle carousel & covers

[cybmole]

can someone remind me please. when I use CC to place an AZW3 into kindle Fire books folder, and thus onto carousel. is the cover being extracted from inside the AZW or is it getting the latest updated cover which calibre has in downloaded metadata?

I suspect it is the former, which is why resizing is not helping ?

I have this one book where the cover is stubbornly not showing on carousel. the book is otherwise OK.
I have resized the cover a couple of times via calibre's resize cover plug-in, deleteed it from device and from CC shelves, acquired it again via content server.... but no joy,. . I have not yet forced a new azw conversion though - do I also need to do that ?

i thought i knew the carousel jpg requirements and that either of 800x600, 900 x 600 were acceptable. I Know that it chokes on ones that are too large , and shows a blank instead.

if I peek into the azw via calibre editor, I see that the cover image in there is 502 x 795, so maybe the issue is that that is too small and I need to force in a resized one ?

[gbm]

Originally Posted by cybmole

can someone remind me please. when I use CC to place an AZW3 into kindle Fire books folder, and thus onto carousel. is the cover being extracted from inside the AZW or is it getting the latest updated cover which calibre has in downloaded metadata?

I suspect it is the former, which is why resizing is not helping ?

I have this one book where the cover is stubbornly not showing on carousel. the book is otherwise OK.
I have resized the cover a couple of times via calibre's resize cover plug-in, deleteed it from device and from CC shelves, acquired it again via content server.... but no joy,. . I have not yet forced a new azw conversion though - do I also need to do that ?

i thought i knew the carousel jpg requirements and that either of 800x600, 900 x 600 were acceptable. I Know that it chokes on ones that are too large , and shows a blank instead.

if I peek into the azw via calibre editor, I see that the cover image in there is 502 x 795, so maybe the issue is that that is too small and I need to force in a resized one ?

No need to do a conversion, just use the image editor in the calibre editor to resize the image, and save.

bernie

[cybmole]

i knew it would be simple... so for editing I just have to find the image editor which you say is lurking inside of the calibre editor....

I will go search..

PS re the size thing , when I looked again at all the image fiels, there were two cover image images, a full sized one and a thumbnail sized one. do all books have that arrangement i.e. is that something that is part of the AZW spec or something that calibre creates when it converts epub to azw

there is still the question of how the hand-off from calibre-> content server -> CC -> kindle gets a cover picture onto the kindle fire carousel.

is it the one inside the book or the one that calibre would send from its metadata as part of a save to disc operation ?

[gbm]

Originally Posted by cybmole

i knew it would be simple... so for editing I just have to find the image editor which you say is lurking inside of the calibre editor....

I will go search..

PS re the size thing , when I looked again at all the image fiels, there were two cover image images, a full sized one and a thumbnail sized one. do all books have that arrangement i.e. is that something that is part of the AZW spec or something that calibre creates when it converts epub to azw

there is still the question of how the hand-off from calibre-> content server -> CC -> kindle gets a cover picture onto the kindle fire carousel.

is it the one inside the book or the one that calibre would send from its metadata as part of a save to disc operation ?

Here is a screen-shot on resizing in the editor.
The fire carousel is a quition for Chaley.

bernie

[chaley]

AFAIK the carousel gets its image from one of two places: the book itself or an amazon web server if the Fire knows that the book is a really-true amazon-purchased book. The cover stored in CC plays no role at all.

[cybmole]

Originally Posted by chaley

AFAIK the carousel gets its image from one of two places: the book itself or an amazon web server if the Fire knows that the book is a really-true amazon-purchased book. The cover stored in CC plays no role at all.

thanks, i thought so. I was going to force a test case by creating an azw and then updating to a completely different cover via calibre add metadata but i think you've saved me the hassle.

I may still do that test, but we are expecting to see that CC shelf gets the latest calibre metadata cover, kindle fire carousel and book tab view gets whatever is inside of azw.

i also found when messing with cover sizes yesterday that KF likes to cache images, so it's sometimes necessary to reboot it, in between delete book, re-download book , for a fair test of cover imaging same book. otherwise it tried to use its cached image.

it is yet another example of me thinking hey maybe this built in kindle reader is not so bad after all, then it pops up a fresh annoyance & I go back to mantano again!

A bit off topic but in that same book, the text looked way small in kinlde reader. checking the css, it had font size 1.2 in main calibre class, font size 0.83333 in body text.. in most readers those two cancel each other out [1.2 * 0.833333=1 ], but kindle seems to only look at the body text size.
after zapping both declarations, the epub was unchanged & the azw was well beahved.