Nook Color: Tips For Displaying Sideloaded Book Covers On NOOKcolor

[DianNC]

Did you happen to connect your NT to your computer with an open browser? The covers on my books will reset and have B&N's stupid banner thingy on them if I do that with my NC. I now make sure the NC wifi setting is off and no browser is running on my computer.

[bfollowell]

Originally Posted by DianNC

Did you happen to connect your NT to your computer with an open browser? The covers on my books will reset and have B&N's stupid banner thingy on them if I do that with my NC. I now make sure the NC wifi setting is off and no browser is running on my computer.

An open browser on my computer or on my NT? If you're talking about on my computer, then yes, I'm certain I did. I have Firefox open to my gmail on my computer almost the whole time it is up. Anytime I've connected my NT to my computer since I received it Christmas, I'm fairly certain a browser window was open. Of course, this problem just cropped up.

While I love Calibre when I need to use it, and I used it a whole lot more for epub to mobi conversions when I was reading on my Kindle 3, I really don't want to go that route now. Calibre is an awesome tool and I don't want to bad mouth it in any way but it does a lot of strange formatting changes even when just doing a basic epub to epub conversion that, at least to me, far outweigh the benefit of this fixing the problem with side-loaded book images.

I saw numerous posts referring to the NC & the NT liking to have the cover id defined as cover in the content.opf file and noticed that most of mine call it something else, usually the filename with a lower case x in front of it. Once I changed this and updated the copy on my NT, all of the covers for the books I've "fixed" are now showing again. Thankfully, no sort of Calibre conversion was required. Hopefully this fix will hold. If it does, this is easy enough for me to change on all of my ebooks in the future.

Thanks to all of the many, MANY posters and suggestions on this thread.

- Byron

[InspiredLife]

The solution I use for this (on a Nook Simple Touch) is to open the book in Sigil. Open the content.opf file in there. Hit CMD-S (Save). If the cover metatag was already in there, but around the wrong way, Sigil fixes it. If there is no cover metatag in there, and a cover image is selected, then Sigil will add the correctly formated cover reference.
In the odd situation where no cover image is embedded in the epub, I have to add it to the epub in Sigil, tell Sigil it is the cover image, then save. But all my epubs have embeded covers, just that the content.opf either has the tag around the wrong way or it is missing entirely.

It's a relatively quick fix, until B&N sort this out.

When I say "around the wrong way", I am referring to the tag being:
<meta content="cover-image-name" name="cover" />

instead of

<meta name="cover" content="cover-image-name" />

Not "wrong" by epub/XML standards, but wrong from the faulty Nook software.

I tried to hack together some python script with the help from folks on Stackoverflow... to scan through a folder (and subfolders, recursively, find epub files, unpack the epub, fix the meta tag in content.opf, repack the epub. I thought it would be a simple enough thing to do... but it was to no avail, as my python skills are zero, and no one was able to help put together such a script.

UPDATE: Looks like I don't even need to open the content.opf file. So long as the epub already has a cover image embedded in it, just opening in Sigil, hitting Save, and closing seems to do the trick.

[aagstn]

Originally Posted by InspiredLife

UPDATE: Looks like I don't even need to open the content.opf file. So long as the epub already has a cover image embedded in it, just opening in Sigil, hitting Save, and closing seems to do the trick.

This works perfectly for me. Thank you.

[BruceMcF]

Originally Posted by afv011

Can you open the epub and look at the location and name of the cover image?

I just opened a sample epub, the cover image is here:

OEBPS/Images/510x680cover20002205.jpg

It may be that the nookColor looks for a file with "cover" in it.

Remember that the shelves and the home page are different programs.

From my experiments, one set of conditions that ensures that the Home Launcher recognizes that the ePub has a cover is:

• The Cover Image ~ I use cover.jpeg ~ in the top level
• The Cover Image as the first item in the manifest with id="cover"
• content.opf is in the top level, not inside OEBPS

It may be that the minimum is less than this ~ this is after a set of experiments with the result of Calibre turning a shortcut ePub without a cover into one with a cover in converting the ePub with the Nook Color as a target.

I have used this to make an ePub web shortcut that uses the cover image as a fake icon and has only one page in the spine, so the shortcuts are right there when you open the ePub. If substantial functionality is available through an m. or touch. version of a site, you can get around some sites not having an app in the store.

I was surprised that taking a working Link Shortcuts ePub and putting the content.opf inside of OEBPS confused things, it may be a difference between what the Home Launcher can do on its own, and information that it is handed by the stock reader app (title and author, after all, show up on the grey box that is the alternate when there is no cover image shown).

Project Gutenburg which always puts content.opf inside OEBPS would never show its cover, unless a filter is written that relocated the cover image and the content.opf to the top level of the internal ePub file hierarchy.

[jennym]

Originally Posted by afv011

Calibre copies a thumbnail with the book. Nookcolor does not use that thumbnail, it gets the cover from the book itself. Make sure your EPUBs actually have a cover.

Thanks for this info. I have the same problems with some ebooks I got from the Gutenberg site ... nice covers I applied in Calibre don't transfer over. I even tried opening the book file in Calibre, found the "cover.jpg", copied it over to the Nook thumbnail file folder, renamed it to coincide with the book name. Still doesn't show up.

Does anyone know how to get the selected cover into the book metadata itself???

P.S. I know this is an old thread, hoping some people are still looking at it!

[afv011]

Originally Posted by jennym

Thanks for this info. I have the same problems with some ebooks I got from the Gutenberg site ... nice covers I applied in Calibre don't transfer over. I even tried opening the book file in Calibre, found the "cover.jpg", copied it over to the Nook thumbnail file folder, renamed it to coincide with the book name. Still doesn't show up.

Does anyone know how to get the selected cover into the book metadata itself???

P.S. I know this is an old thread, hoping some people are still looking at it!

Use Sigil. These are the steps:

• Open your book
• Expand the "Images" section on the left
• Right click on the image you have set as cover
• Select "Add Semantics" and then "Cover"
• Save your book

[jennym]

Even though this is an old thread, thought many (like me) may still be searching for an answer. I figured it out, at least for my problems. I used calibre to fix metadata, get cover pics, then convert other formats to epub for my Nook Color. But, the epubs I got from the Gutenberg site, libraries, etc. I didn't convert after doing that since they already were epubs. I just downloaded to my Nook. I posted a couple days ago for help, but then figured it out.

See my thread at:
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...00#post1996100

Hope it helps!

[BruceMcF]

Originally Posted by afv011

Use Sigil. These are the steps:

• Open your book
• Expand the "Images" section on the left
• Right click on the image you have set as cover
• Select "Add Semantics" and then "Cover"
• Save your book

I don't have Sigil installed yet, but in Windows if there is a cover that cannot be seen because of content= before name="cover" it also works to:

• Open the epub as an archive using 7zip
• Extract the folder containing the .opf file ~ OEBPS, OPS, etc. With Project Gutenburg is it a numbered folder with the number being the PG index for the book.
• Open the .opf file ~ often content.opf ~ with Wordpad.
• Search for name="cover"
• Cut the name="cover" including the leading space, and paste it right after "<meta"
• Save the file(1).
• With 7zip, pick "add to archive", hit the [...] button at the top right, select the epub, hit [OPEN] in the file browser, then [OK] in the main control panel.

(1. Note that I have my file folder view options set to show all file extensions, which prevents the misbehavior of some Windows apps in messing around with file extensions.)

I'll experiment with getting a sed script that can do the editing reliably. Adding a cover for the Home page requires adding the cover to the zip archive, and in the .opf file adding a <meta tag for a cover (rather than editing one that exists), and adding the cover image to the manifest. The Nook Color home page, at least, does not require that an embedded cover is in the spine, though some other ereaders expect it there.

[jennym]

Originally Posted by afv011

Use Sigil. These are the steps:

• Open your book
• Expand the "Images" section on the left
• Right click on the image you have set as cover
• Select "Add Semantics" and then "Cover"
• Save your book

I saw this right after I'd posted my "solution" but wanted to thank you. I was not familiar with the Sigil software and just took a quick look, downloaded it. It looks like something I will use for a number of things, including writing some ebooks myself.

Just wanted to thank you!

[0047Casey]

I can get the cover art to appear on my NC but on some of the covers it appears as though the bottom of the cover art has been cropped off. I have tried using different images with the same result. How can I fix the covers so that the entire image appears?

[Hoods7070]

FWIW I do use Calibre, with my NC in airplane mode. But I use kiwidude's Modify Epub plugin to ensure that my cover has "taken". I mostly design my own book covers to ensure they're no degraded as so many that you get with your books are - and it's fun. I was constantly frustrated by the altered covers not showing up on both my NC and my Kobo Touch. The solution is easy.

In Calibre, edit metadata to choose any cover image you want, the go to the plugin and run it with "Insert or replace cover" checked. Also, I remove the SVG cover when converting to epub in Calibre. It's also a great way to change the metadata and place it at the front of the book as a jacket with the add/replace metadata option at the same time - and any other odds and ends you want.

HTH

[Tattncat]

Originally Posted by boswd

just got done sideloading my calibre books and all book cover images came through just fine, sitting up on my shelves and on the main shelf looking just like my BN bought books.

not sure what are people are doing wrong or where they got the books in what format, etc, because I did not do anything extra all came through perfect.

What was the process you used for the sideloading?

Did you use Calibe's save to disk or Calibre's send specific format to card b? Or did you load the ebooks on to a file and then drag and drop directly to the msd card?