How to: Creating custom iBook covers
Do you find yourself downloading a lot of the free Project Gutenberg public domain books in the iBookstore? Sick of your bookshelf looking like a series of paper bags with text printed on them? Me too, so I decided to create my own covers for all the free books I've downloaded.If you've ever added custom album artwork to an iTunes song, you get the basic idea of how to change the cover art of a Project Gutenberg book in your iTunes library. If you haven't, I'll quickly list the steps here:
- In your iTunes library, select the Books category in the source list.
- Select any book that shows it has no cover, right click on it, and select "Get Info."
- Select the "Artwork" tab.
- Drag and drop any image into the white box on the artwork tab and click Okay. Voila! You've just added a custom cover to your ebook.
Where do you get cover images from? Google Image search whatever book you are looking for and add "cover" to the end of the keywords. You'll get a host of results (most from Amazon) of book covers. Keep in mind that most of the covers you will find will have two things against them: they are most likely copyrighted, and their aspect ratio will probably not match the default aspect ratio of the book covers from the iBookstore.
If you want to avoid a lawsuit and have a unified look across your iBooks bookshelf, you can do what I did. For this short tutorial, I decided to make a cover for one of my favorite books, War and Peace.
- Find a cover image. For mine, I used a photo I took while on a trip in Russia of a statue of Leo Tolstoy.
- Open the photo in any image editing software. Don't crop it yet, give yourself some space to adjust the titles and image.
- Create your title: overlay the text you want on the photo. I just added the title of the book and the author's name.
- Have everything looking the way you want? Good. Now what you need to do is crop the image to give it the aspect ratio of other iBookstore ebooks. As you'll notice, in my first attempt I came in just a bit short at 414 pixels wide by 600 pixels high. Changing it to 420x599 pixels will give you a more exact match to other iBookstore ebooks covers.
- After you've cropped the image, double check that you don't have to readjust any of the text you wrote. Then, if everything looks good, flatten the image into a single layer.
- Save your image as a high quality JPEG file.
- Now all you have to do is add the image to the ebook file in your iTunes library using the steps listed above and boom! you've got your custom book cover.
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Do you find yourself downloading a lot of the free Project Gutenberg public domain books in the iBookstore? Sick of your bookshelf looking...
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This okay, but what if I just want the generic default cover image like the yellow cover page for "War and Peace"?
When I uploaded my ePub files (that I converted from PDF files using Calibre) into iTunes and synced them with my iBooks on iPhone, I can't even see the generic default cover image (the yellow cover with the title on it). All I see is a library full of white blank images with nothing written on it.
I have to manually open my 500+ books to see what book they are. I don't want iTunes (or Calibre) to convert the ePubs without cover image into a blank cover image. I just want them to have the default cover image.
Deleting the app and resyncing worked for me, too. Thanks for the tip!
May 27 2010 at 2:16 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyIt worked for me by deleting the app from the iPad and syncing it.
May 18 2010 at 6:56 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyInstead of creating your own, here is a great source of actual cover pics:
http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/
A bit heavy on the sf and fantasy side, but it has a lot of mainstream authors as well.
yup, this is the simple way of doing it quickly. I've already deal with this problem in the first week I got the iPad.
HOWEVER, if you go into your table of contents in landscape mode, you'll see that your default brown cover with page title on the left, not the new pretty image you put into the Info/Artwork section.
Give it a try. Last time I checked it's still showing this behavior and I had to search the Internet up and down to find a way to fix it. (yeah I am annoyed by this inconsistency).
The actual way to have both the pretty cover on the shelf, cover, and in the landscape mode TOC involves ~10 steps and will require you to open the epub file to edit meta file to include a NON-STANDARD epub meta tag. Of course Apple don't tell you that, and all their books looks good and everyone else have to figure out how they do it...
On a side note, Project Gutenberg books does have cover, it's just that iTunes don't read it... correctly.
This has all been widely discussed by eBook makers on the Web...
PS. anyone want me to list out the steps for making the cover show up in all places correctly just leave me a note here. I didn't want to go through the trouble listing it since judging from the response, people dont' quite care about having pretty covers...
I care. please list the steps.
May 17 2010 at 6:09 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyI can't imagine there's any copyright issue to worry about here. If you were to download a copyrighted cover image for War and Peace and sell copies of W&P that you printed *with that cover*, then yeah, that would be copyright infringement. But for your own personal use? I'd say "no problem" for two reasons:
- I don't think downloading a cover image and looking at it in iBooks is any different than downloading a cover image and looking at it in the Finder.
- If it's legal to download cover art for songs you have in iTunes, it should be equally fine to download covers art for books you have in iBooks--and iTunes has this capability built in, and I'm sure Apple's lawyers gave this functionality the green light.
Do you lose you bookmarks/ positions in book when you remove and reinstall iBooks?
May 17 2010 at 4:11 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply@asif - I expected to (thinking that such data was private to the app and would be deleted with it), but everything was preserved.
May 17 2010 at 11:01 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyThanks, Danny, I'll try this tonight.
May 17 2010 at 12:20 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyTiesto - Ten Seconds Before Sunrise
May 16 2010 at 10:35 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyIf you don't mind using copyrighted covers, I'd suggest Barnes and Noble over Amazon. Too many of Amazon's covers are either "search inside" covers or are enclosed in a white background square, and really screw up your bookcase view. I don't mind that some of the images are not exactly the right aspect ratio, since the irregular sizes make it look more like a real bookshelf.
May 16 2010 at 8:46 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Replyyup, I have the same problem, the artwork doesn't get updated on the iPad after the first sync for books.
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