PDFs & cover art; or lack thereof

[kendralucille]

Just upgraded to NT tablet today- I had my NC for about three weeks I had received as a gift and my local store let me more or less exchange it.

Therefore, I already have experience with having to reconvert my sideloaded books to epub (Calibre), so the cover art will show up.

Files that are originally PDFs, however, are a different story. I have about four of my craft/sewing books that I scanned, so I need that pinch & zoom feature- when I convert them to epubs, the cover shows up no problem. But it screws with the size, and is no longer pinch & zoom-able.

I know a lot of had this problem, because I googled the heck out of it before finally coming here. There has got to be a way to make the NT recognize the PDF cover art...has anyone found any solution yet?

[SteveMacqueen]

I am having the same problem and am a little disappointed that I have not come up with a solution yet (after 2 hours of trying). Many of the questions posted on the B&N forums are not being answered, does B&N have administrators who assist with questions?

Please PM me with this solution. As stated in the previous post, when I convert the PDF file to an epub using Calibre and transfer the epub to the magazine folder and the jpg to the thumbnail folder all works well (except the epub format is unacceptable for magazine viewing). PDFs are loading and working great on the Nook Tablet but the cover art is not being recognized. I am OCD when it comes to stuff like this and I will not put my magazines on my tablet until this is fixed.

Please help!

Thank you

[NookGardener]

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SteveMacqueen wrote:

Please PM me with this solution. As stated in the previous post, when I convert the PDF file to an epub using Calibre and transfer the epub to the magazine folder and the jpg to the thumbnail folder all works well (except the epub format is unacceptable for magazine viewing). PDFs are loading and working great on the Nook Tablet but the cover art is not being recognized. I am OCD when it comes to stuff like this and I will not put my magazines on my tablet until this is fixed.

Please help!

Thank you

---

I'm not sure I even understand what you are trying to do.  In one sentence you've stated that the epub format is unacceptable for magazine viewing.  In the next, you've said the pdf's work great but the cover art isn't being recognized.  I'm finding your post confusing.  But you sound frustrated so I'll share with you what I know, and you can take it from there.

1) Magazines purchased from B&N don't need to be sideloaded.  They download directly with their covers and you can choose pinch and zoom or article view to read.

2) Are you trying to sideload magazines purchased from other places?  Are they DRM protected?  If they ARE NOT, read the reviews on ezPDF reader, maybe look for some how-to videos on how it works to see if it might meet your needs.  Also, ezPDF reader will look for all your pdf files and allows you to view them by folder.  Once you have actually opened up the pdf once, it will display them with the cover (though admittedly very small icon, not even an inch.)  Will also give you ability to either pinch/zoom or read in text mode.  (There's actually text to speech in there too but her voice is very computerish and annoying.)  My experience with Calibre is limited (mainly adding covers and such); is there a way to strip the DRM from a pdf file and keep it a pdf file?

Hope this helps you.

[ChrisZeh]

I'm also having this problem. I can't seem to find anyway to make a cover for the PDF. I would think it should automatically use the 1st page of the PDF.

I tried using Calibre, but it doesn't seem to work. I've found many different forum posts across the web asking for help on this, but no solutions that I can find. Anyone?

[kendralucille]

Chris;

I recently added some new PDFs to my nook, and got on my computer to google around to see if anyone had figured this out yet (I got little to no response with my questions on here, and had nearly forgotten) and saw that you linked back to my question on another site, here:

http://nookdeveloper.zendesk.com/entries/20826393-nook-tablet-pdf-covers

Which, had an interesting solution that involved "wrapping" the PDF in an Epub. Did that work for you?

And, to try to clear up any confusion for those who aren't understanding our problem: Converting most PDFs to Epub renders them unreadable, but keeping them so leaves us with unattractive, virtually indistinguishable covers. Covers would not only be more aesthetically pleasing, but a little easier for my brain to skim and discern one cover from another.

[ChrisZeh]

Hi kendralucille,

Sorry for the delay in response, I wish this forum would email me when a thread is updated

I actually did give it a try without much luck. The thread you linked to was locked becasuse it was "answered", so I was forced to open a new thread with my results and a follow up question: http://nookdeveloper.zendesk.com/entries/20822157-pdf-in-epub-with-nook-tablet

It's been a few weeks with no response yet. I tried to send a twitter message to @NOOKdeveloper asking them to look into it. I can't believe it's this hard to add a cover to a PDF

[SteveMacqueen]

Hello All,

Unfortunately I am not able to offer a solution either. Through my research and pestering of Barnes and Noble I have found out that cover art for pdf's and cbz files (comics) do not display in the libary and there is no fix to this yet. I am also frustrated that I cannot manually decide which library tab my files appear under (i.e. - epubs automatically go to book and pdf's automatcally magazine, and I have some cookbooks that are viewed best in pdf format as well as comic books that won't even show in my library but rather I have to search "My Files" for them). 

We can only hope that a firmware update is released by B&N soon that has these errors corrected. If I wasn't so OCD about such things I would be 100% satisfied with my Nook purchase. However my visual displeasure and 2 second search time for my cbz files cause me to only be 80% satisfied (Yes, that much less).

Take Care All and Happy Reading

[SteveMacqueen]

Ignore my comment on the cbz files. I forgot to try the "My Shelf" feature. Unfortunately pdfs still don't work but the cbz cover art does.

-Matt

[ChrisZeh]

Hi SteveMacqueen,

Thanks for sharing your experience. At the beginning of my quest to figure out how to get PDF covers to work, I assumed there had to be a way, now I'm coming to the sad realization it might just not be possible.

I saw a little note over on Engadget that the next revision of the NOOK is going to be dropping soon. So it seems B&N is pushing the developers so hard to get new releases out, they aren't spending enough time polishing the software/firmware.

I ended up buying the ezPDF software for a couple of bucks, this really helps organize the PDF's a little better, and it actually does display the cover when looking at the "Recently Read" tab.

[cgsmom]

I also have some craft books purchased in pdf format. The stock reader will not show the first page as the cover of the book or magazine.  However, the ezPDF Reader app will show the first page of the pdf as the cover.  However, Crochet! magazine still does not show.  I am not sure why.  I like ezPDF reader and I am glad I purchased it.  It works for almost all of my magazines and craft books.

[SteveMacqueen]

Hello All,

I am happy to announce that I have found a solution that is relatively easy (depending on your technical skills) and free. 

In my previous post I mentioned that CBZ files show their cover art but PDF's do not. CBZ files are simply JPG files that are ZIP'd together in a format that the Nook can recognize. So I thought, if I was able to take a PDF and convert it to a zip, would that solve the cover art issue we all are facing? Well it did!

Here is my recommendation for you all -

1. Download the free software Calibre (an e-book management tool) and install it on your computer. 
2. After installation, open it and add your PDF magazine to your Calibre library. 
3. In the top left corner of Calibre, select "Convert Books" and choose to convert individually
4. A new menu will pop up and in the top right there will be a drop down menu to select the output format. Chose ZIP and select "OK" to begin converting your PDF to ZIP. 
5. After converting the file, select the file in your Calibre library and on the right hand side (under the Cover Image), click on the link where it says "Path:  Click to Open"
6. A new menu will open that shows you the where the zip file was stored on your computer. 
7. Select the ZIP file and right click your mouse to "rename." Replace the .zip with .cbz (a format the Nook recognizes)
8. Simply drag the CBZ file to the proper destination folder on your Nook (My Files > Magazines)
9. Eject your Nook and Enjoy the Cover Art!

Fairly Simple as you can see! From what I can tell, Nook is reading it the same as it would a PDF and zooming in and out works flawlessly. 

I ran into one problem though (wasn't a big deal to me but may be to some others). After I put the CBZ magazine on the Nook and viewed the cover art, Nook wasn't using the proper cover image to display the cover art. I simply went back into the file and found the jpg Nook thought was the "cover" and rename the file with the actual cover image file (i.e. - index-1.jpg was renamed to wrong.jpg and cover.jpg was renamed to index-1.jpg). This solved the problem.

I hope this helps. Please let me know if you have any questions or if you find a solution for the one problem I ran into!

[SteveMacqueen]

They also have free PDF to CBZ converters online that can be downloaded but I have not tried them yet. I am not familiar with any of the companies that offer this tool for download and I do not like to download exe files from places I am unsure of. Calibre is a well known e-reader tool and I feel safer using it....

[ChrisZeh]

Hi SteveMacqueen,

This sounds like the approach I tried, where I put the PDF into an ePub which is also like a ZIP file. I never thought to try it with the CBZ format. I'll give this a try and report back to let you know how it goes.

Thanks for the info!

[ChrisZeh]

Hey Steve,

I gave your CBZ solution a shot, and unfortunately it didn't work for me and my particular PDF. As far as I can tell converting the PDF into a ZIP actually first converts it into an HTML file. Unfortunatly, just like trying to convert the PDF into an ePub it doesn't grasp the file format very well and looks unreadble.

Here is my original PDF: goo.gl/2X5p1

And here is the CBZ if you're interested in seeing what happened: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4684484/DE0-Nano%20User%20Manual%20-%20Terasic.cbz

I'm sure this would work for a fair amount of PDF's though. Thanks!

[SteveMacqueen]

Hello Chris,

could you send me a link to the original pdf file once more. I was able to download the cbz file from your original post but not the pdf. I want to ensure I have the correct file to work with before I start messing around with it. 

Thank you

[ChrisZeh]

Hi Steve,

Here is the link to the PDF again: goo.gl/2X5p1

Thanks for giving this a try.

This weekend I had high hopes that I could create another ePub (Which is like a ZIP), this time creating it with zero compression thinking that the NOOK had problems decompressing the PDF on the fly....didn't work, same results as my last ePub...back to the drawing board.

Regards,

Chris