Make your own thumbnails for the new *50 series of eReaders!

[Squirsier]

Hello

Some of you don't like thumbnail view, while some of us enjoy the look.

However, I wasn't especially pleased with how the new Sony Readers generated the thumbnail views from the files' covers.

For ePubs, they were stretched, even when converted with Calibre with the option to keep the aspect ratio of the covers. Second, on some LRF files, white borders were added on the left and right of the thumbnails for no apparent reasons.

Furthermore, they always looked fuzzy to me.

So tonight I was browsing my PRS-350's folders when I stumbled upon this one :

(root)database/thumbnail/database/media/books

What you'll find afterwards are folders with the names of the authors, and under those, more folders with the titles of the books for such authors and finally, a file called "main_thumbnail.jpg" .

As it turns out, this generated thumbnail is 1) very compressed (to save space, they take about 5k a picture) 2) in black and white and 3) a maximum height of 217 (this is key).

What I found out is that you can replace those files with your own, as long as you keep the height of the thumbnails to no more than 217 pixels. You CAN save them in color. A typical colored thumbnail with 100% Quality turns out to be around 25k.

Yes, 5 times the space, but worth it imho, unless you're running out of space. The thumbnails are MUCH sharper and keep the correct aspect ratio of the original covers.

All you need to do after editing your own thumbnails to your favorite setting, is to save the file on top of "main_thumbnail.jpg" in the folders mentionned above in this post. Voilà! The reader will not need to reload anything, the thumbnails will be viewable instantly!

[slantybard]

That's dedication to your library if you make one for every ebook. Maybe someone will write a plugin for calibre to automate this. I have been adding my own screensavers which has been lots of fun.

[babyd]

brilliant, thanks for this, I am a bit of a perfectionist so I will go through all mine and do this