iPad Apple Books not showing some ePub covers

[Marg1780]

For some of the books I load (via Dropbox) into Apple Books (and iBooks before it), all I see in my library is a generic auto-generated cover.

I have tried pulling the books into Sigil and just using it to redefine the cover image. That often solves the problem with books that haven't had a properly set-up cover, but sometimes it fails to correct the problem.

Can anyone point me at a list of "gotchas" with iBooks, or pass along other hints on what might be hanging it up?

Thanks in advance!

[Marg1780]

I've tried loading the problem ePubs into KyBook 3, Bluefire Reader, Gerty, Marvin and Yomu, and the covers work perfectly well in all of them, so it seems to be a very specific iBooks/aBooks gotcha.

[DaleDe]

From our iBooks wiki page under tips:
If the cover doesn't show up, you can open it in Sigil, browse to the "Images" folder, right click the image, select "Add Semantics" and choose "Cover".

DAle

[Marg1780]

(I answered this a day or so ago, but it hasn't posted so I'm trying again.) Thanks for the suggestion and link, but the info over there is a few revs of Sigil out of date. You can still do it manually if you want to but the easier way now is to use the "Add cover" function in the Tools menu. This sets up the cover image semantics and places your chosen image in a nice svg box.

That is usually my cure-all for cover image problems, but in these two cases it didn't help. In case the function had somehow failed, I did double-check everything I know about - the semantics and the meta line in the opf file - and it all looks normal, yet still no cover showing ONLY on iBooks. I think Apple has some kind of limiters on image size, too, but the failed cover images are smaller than other ones which work just fine.

I've tried to find a detailed list of Apple-specific gotchas, but had no luck so far. I am really-really puzzled.

[jayjam]

Hi everyone,
I have the same problem, I updated to Catalina and then updated iPhone and iPad to the latest iOS and no cover art is showing on either iOS device. however it shows correctly in Catalina. Art showed correctly before the updates so I cannot identify where the problem is. Does anyone have a fix.
Thanks.
jay

[Tony Tale]

Originally Posted by jayjam

Hi everyone,
I have the same problem, I updated to Catalina and then updated iPhone and iPad to the latest iOS and no cover art is showing on either iOS device. however it shows correctly in Catalina. Art showed correctly before the updates so I cannot identify where the problem is. Does anyone have a fix.
Thanks.
jay

I'm in the exact same boat (same OS-es y todo). It's not the end of the world as I'm still able to read the epub books but I do much prefer to have a nicely placed cover art image for each title.

Please do let us know if anyone has a fix.

[Thorkyle]

This works, takes a couple of steps, hopefully fixed at some point. Cheers.
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/250724684

[jayjam]

Thankyou Thorkyle for posting the fix just done the steps you described and it worked perfectly.

[astkaasa]

I recently revisited Apple Books and noticed it has undergone significant changes. The new customization options for margins, spacing, and text justification have greatly improved the rendering of my epub files. However, there is a minor and longstanding issue: the cover does not display correctly unless edited with Calibre using "mark certain image as cover image." After checking the differences between the old and new epub files post-saving, I found out that only one line requires modification.

Locate the metadata section within the content.opf file, identify the tag <meta name="cover">, and update its content to match the id of the image item listed in the subsequent manifest section. For example, the content of the meta tag named "cover" should be updated to "img_html_images_cover".

<meta name="cover" content="Images/html/images/cover.jpg"/>
...
<item id="img_html_images_cover" href="Images/html/images/cover.jpg" media-type="image/jpeg" />

[steveparry]

I updated to Sequoia and now none of my epubs will preview in QuickLook except for the cover image