Nook Color: Tips For Displaying Sideloaded Book Covers On NOOKcolor

[Themus]

Just an update. I tried again, ePub to ePub conversion. Cover came over and I thought I was on my way. Plugged my Nook Color back in and did another ePub to ePub conversion.

Unplugged Nook Color from USB cable and last ePub has cover, but first one now does not. I am beginning to think B&N has some code in their processes which affects the covers being depicted on the device.

[belden]

Just another update, after doing some research, I've been using Sigil to open each ePub and then save it without changing anything. I then go into Calibre and manually select the cover art from within the directory Calibre has downloaded it to. I then convert the ePub to ePub. Doing this has had EVERY SINGLE book cover show up correctly (and this number is in the hundreds). If I don't do either one of these two things, the cover doesn't show up, so I'm not sure what is ultimately responsible.

On a side note, I'm using a Mac and on occasion have forgotten to 'eject' the Nook Color before unplug it. I've had a number of issues with the library having to be rebuilt and the books disappearing and then having to be rescanned before showing up again. On one of these occasions a large section of the books suddenly had their cover art disappear. After deleting these files from the Nook Color and then transferring them again (without changing the ePubs at all) the covers were suddenly back. This again leads me to believe the Nook Color software and not the ePubs themselves is what is causing the issues.

[jmcging]

Belden,

Are you doing the Sigil open/close as well as the Calibre epub/epub convert on the documents in your Calibre library and then moving them to the NC or are you doing the above directly on the epubs housed on the NC?

Thanks

John

[belden]

Originally Posted by jmcging

Are you doing the Sigil open/close as well as the Calibre epub/epub convert on the documents in your Calibre library and then moving them to the NC or are you doing the above directly on the epubs housed on the NC?

I have been doing all of this BEFORE sending anything to the Nook. I open the epub in Sigil and then save it again. I then open the metadata window in Calibre and select the cover art and then run the conversion process of epub to epub. Finally I send the files to the Nook. I've tried editing the files on the Nook itself but this didn't always update the cover art.

Just opening and saving the file with Sigil normally ensures that the cover art will show up correctly, but doing both of these steps is the only thing I have tried that has worked every single time. One additional benefit (although with 5 GB on the Nook Color and an 8 GB SD card it doesn't much matter) is that saving the file in Sigil occasionally shrinks the file size of the original epub.

[leday]

Originally Posted by Themus

Just an update. I tried again, ePub to ePub conversion. Cover came over and I thought I was on my way. Plugged my Nook Color back in and did another ePub to ePub conversion.

Unplugged Nook Color from USB cable and last ePub has cover, but first one now does not. I am beginning to think B&N has some code in their processes which affects the covers being depicted on the device.

I don't know if this might help, but when I converted epub to epub to get my covers to come over, and some of them that I had previously were "lost", I did a hard reboot of the nook (powered off completely, then powered back on) and then the "lost" covers came back.

Also, when I did epub to epub, most of my covers came over, but some did not. For those, I had to convert epub to mobi, and then convert BACK from mobi to epub, and that worked. Now, all of my covers are loaded (occasionally I still had to do a hard reboot for some covers to show back up after the conversions and book downloads, but now that they are all there, and everything works fine)

P.S... This was all done using Calibre alone (did not have to use Sigil and did not have to explode/tweak the epubs. Just used Calibre to covert epub to epub, epub to mobi and/or mobi to epub)

[Tess89]

The epub to mobi to epub conversion solution has worked 100% of the time for me. Sometimes the covers do disappear after I unplug from the computer but they usually come back if I wait long enough. I haven't found reboots to be necessary.

[jmcging]

Originally Posted by belden

I have been doing all of this BEFORE sending anything to the Nook. I open the epub in Sigil and then save it again. I then open the metadata window in Calibre and select the cover art and then run the conversion process of epub to epub. Finally I send the files to the Nook. I've tried editing the files on the Nook itself but this didn't always update the cover art.

My thanks for the clarification. Too bad my wife took the NC away from me and said "no more till xmas eve...."

I can see this bears watching and I have some work to do I can do now before I get it back

[leday]

Originally Posted by jmcging

My thanks for the clarification. Too bad my wife took the NC away from me and said "no more till xmas eve...."

I can see this bears watching and I have some work to do I can do now before I get it back

See my above post and you may not have to go through all of this complexity. Use Calibre to convert epub to epub and redownload the book to the NC. For any that do not work with this, use Calibre to convert from epub to MOBI and then back from MOBI to epub again, and then redownload. This has worked 100% for me without having to use anything other than Calibre conversions.

[aagstn]

I worry that converting them just to get the covers is going to mess up the original formatting for the epub. All of my old eReader format books that I converted to ePub do have the covers, but in the conversion a few weird things happened like an occasional book lost the table of contents.

I'm just going to wait for B&N to fix this so I don't end up screwing up my ePubs.

[Bookworm_Girl]

Originally Posted by leday

See my above post and you may not have to go through all of this complexity. Use Calibre to convert epub to epub and redownload the book to the NC. For any that do not work with this, use Calibre to convert from epub to MOBI and then back from MOBI to epub again, and then redownload. This has worked 100% for me without having to use anything other than Calibre conversions.

Thanks, leday! This solution worked for me too. I guess I am not too surprised because I also have to do a MOBI to MOBI conversion in calibre to get covers to stick for my Kindle. Did you notice any trends about the conversions? I tried four books. Two were Google ebooks, and they worked with the EPUB to EPUB conversion. Two were from feedbooks, and they worked with the EPUB to MOBI to EPUB conversion.

[negris123]

I use calibre, most of my books have covers (the thumbnail added by calibre) but this cover does not show up on the library as the book cover. It is replaced by a blue cover with an N on it (I guess default cover for anything that does not have one). What is most annoying is that all the cover thumbnails show up on my Gallery in the Extras section of the nook. I deleted them all from the gallery and next time I connected my nook to the computer to sideload books from calibre, it added ALL the thumbnails back automatically, I don't know how, so all these images are again in my Gallery, which I don't want them to be, but, oh well, I guess software updates are in order. These are small issues, though, and overall I am very pleased with my NC

[Synergi]

I can't say I am. I am ready to chuck my Nook out the window. I've been coverting to epub or saving to epub to convert to epub, rebuilding meta data, rebooting, you name it and the covers just will not show up. I checked the content file like someone said and got rid of the 1 on cover in the two spots. Still will not show up. It shouldn't be this annoying to get a book cover to show up. Same goes with PDF's, they show up in the Magazine but not on the outside cover. So I have a shelf full of generic blue covers. -sighs- I thought this was going to be easier then my Kindle.. I'm not seeing it so far.

And B&N is no help either. They even told me sorry we don't support PDF's so I don't know, I'm want to love it but I want to see the covers. I can always root it I guess and download a PDF viewer but I shouldn't have to, this is a reader after all.

Sorry I'm venting but I've been messing with this for about 5 hours, following everyones suggestions. Nothings working.

[LoganK]

Originally Posted by Synergi

I checked the content file like someone said and got rid of the 1 on cover in the two spots. Still will not show up.

The 'id="cover"' trick has worked for me every time. (In fact, for books that don't have a cover at all, I drop the jpeg in there, and add a line like '<item href="cover.jpg" id="cover" media-type="image/jpeg"/>' to the manifest of the opf.)

I'm not sure what you are doing differently that would cause it to not work. Two suggestions are refresh the list (use the drop-down in the upper right to change the sort order ... someone else claimed this worked for them), and, obviously, reboot your nook color.

The jpeg thumbnail issue with Calibre will likely be addressed soon.

[leday]

Originally Posted by Bookworm_Girl

Thanks, leday! This solution worked for me too. I guess I am not too surprised because I also have to do a MOBI to MOBI conversion in calibre to get covers to stick for my Kindle. Did you notice any trends about the conversions? I tried four books. Two were Google ebooks, and they worked with the EPUB to EPUB conversion. Two were from feedbooks, and they worked with the EPUB to MOBI to EPUB conversion.

No, I haven't noted any particular trends that I can tell. It's just quirky to me that this happens and you have to do these conversions before the device will recognize the covers. All of my books are DRM-stripped, so maybe that has some effect, but I don't know why some covers come over with no problem and some you have to tweak with conversions to get it.

I just purchased 2 books last night from BooksOnBoard and had to do an epub-MOBI-Epub conversion, AND then TweakEpub/Rebuild Epub on the final converted book to get the cover, which showed up after a reboot of my NC.

In any event, at least I know I CAN get the covers to show now.

[leday]

Originally Posted by Synergi

I can't say I am. I am ready to chuck my Nook out the window. I've been coverting to epub or saving to epub to convert to epub, rebuilding meta data, rebooting, you name it and the covers just will not show up.
.

When my conversions from epub to epub didn't work (some did and some didn't), I converted them from epub to Mobi and then BACK again from MOBI to epub and that has always worked (only twice did I have to use the TweakEpub feature to rebuild the epub on the final converted Mobi-to-epub file). All the rest worked this way. Did you try this?

P.S. I made sure the incorrect books were deleted off my NC before I downloaded the correctly converted books again.

P.P.S., after the conversions, just to make sure, I did a hard reboot of my Nook color and then they all showed up. (powered down the NC completely, and then powered it back on).