Change book cover art work for iBook

by Larry Roth on Apr.10, 2010, under Apple

If you bought an iPad and you are as frugal as I am (wait, do those two things go together?), then you undoubtedly downloaded a few of the free books from the iBook store. I am really glad that Apple repurposed content from the Project Gutenberg collection of public domain books. Project Gutenberg has an astounding selection of classics all available for free!

But one of the things I noticed about these books is that they have a generic cover with the title appearing in dynamic text. After a little poking around in the iBook EPUB files, I noticed that Apple is grabbing the cover art from some Apple specific data they add to the EPUB files (more on this in a future blog post). This makes sense since there doesn’t appear to be an industry standard for displaying cover art in a reader. If there is no cover art specified, it seems they are just dynamically adding the title over a generic cover,

I started to think of a way to easily add the necessary info to the EPUB files via a perl script when I though perhaps Apple already has a way that is a little simpler. Then it occurred to me that since books appear in iTunes just like music, perhaps the same trick to add album art would work for book covers…and it did!

Here is what to do:
1). Open iTunes and click on Books
2). Select the book you want to add cover art to and select Get Info from the File menu
3). Click on the Artwork tab
4). Click the Add… button select the file that contains the image you want to use for the cover art. Alternatively, you can paste an image from your clipboard into the box.
5). Click OK and you are done.

The next time you sync, the new cover art will appear!

A couple notes. First, it seems to impact performance of loading the iBook shelf if you use really large images. I think it would be best to scale the image down before adding it. Second, you may ask were you can get cover art. I don’t have a good answer—if you do, please leave a comment. I know for music many people would grab the CD cover from Amazon. I don’t wish to tackle the legality or ethics of this, so I will leave that step up to you dear reader.

If you have a better way to add cover art or have a thought about this process, please leave me a comment.

:cover art, iBook, iPad

18 comments for this entry:

J Mac
April 11th, 2010 on 6:38 pm
That does not change book cover in iBooks. Sorry.
Larry Roth
April 11th, 2010 on 11:11 pm
@J Mac it has worked on all the books I tried. The were all free books, maybe that makes a difference?
K S
April 13th, 2010 on 5:49 am
It seems that this can only be edited once. I can’t change the image once I did it already. Anyone else have this problem? I’m using iTunes on a Mac. When I delete the book and redownload it, it keeps the same cover art. It doesn’t replace it when viewed in the “bookshelf view”. Very frustrating.
Larry Roth
April 13th, 2010 on 8:14 am
@KS, I just tried replacing the cover art as well and had the same issue. To be clear, I deleted the book from the iPad, synced, changed the cover in iTunes and synced again. Thanks for pointing this out, I will see if there is a work around.
K S
April 13th, 2010 on 1:45 pm
@Larry Roth, Trust me, I tried the processes you just described and iBooks still kept the old cover! My example is specific to Alice’s Adventure in Wonderland. The workaround I had to go through was to RESET and DELETE the whole iPad. Since I don’t have much content on it, I don’t mind doing it now. But this problem needs to be fixed by apple.
K S
April 13th, 2010 on 1:48 pm
@Larry Roth, I’m sorry, I wasn’t sure what you said. Did you successfully REPLACE the cover after deleting and syncing?
Larry Roth
April 13th, 2010 on 1:52 pm
@KS, no need to apologize, I wasn’t very clear. It did NOT work for me either. It does change in iTunes, but not on the iPad. My guess is that there is some sort of caching in iBooks. I bet there is an easy hack around it–I’m interested in trying to figure this out, and will let you know if I do.
K S
April 13th, 2010 on 2:05 pm
Thanks! It seems like we aren’t the only ones dealing with this issue. User “lunged” in this forum: http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=11344701 described the same problem.
Troy
April 14th, 2010 on 9:47 pm
Hey guys. Figured it out. Delete the iBook app. Redownload it from the app store. Voila. Default art.
Larry Roth
April 14th, 2010 on 10:26 pm
@Troy, nice fix! I tried a different approach which was to unsync all the books and resync them. Didn’t work. I am guessing that your approach worked because iBook must create a separate XML file (or other metadata file) of the book titles and cover art to speed up the load time of the shelf.

Since all the cover art files are contained in the EPUBS, and all the EPUBS are .Zip files, I would think it would be really slow to grab each of those when iBook launches. I am guessing they have a bug where they are not removing the cover art from the metadata file when you delete the book. Also, they don’t seem to check if the cover art has changed–maybe because they assume if the same book is there it has the same art.

I have notice that the album art on my iPhone gets out of sync once in a while. I wonder if it’s a related issue.
Troy
April 15th, 2010 on 10:46 pm
I’m not exactly sure what it does. It’s funny that when I redownloaded the app, all of my books were there (I didn’t have to download those as well). And the app remembered my exact spot in those books. Yet all the art was gone.
K S
April 17th, 2010 on 9:10 pm
Thanks guys!
Yong
April 22nd, 2010 on 7:30 pm
Check out this facebook page, I’ve actually done the work of finding cool images for the free books and have been sending it out to people interested in them for $2.99 for all the free books. I haven’t created a cover for all of them yet, but for $2.99, I’ll send you every cover that I currently have and all future covers that I’m currently making!

Just let me know if you’re interested.

My Facebook fanpage is http://www.facebook.com/pages/iBook-Custom-Covers-for-Free-Books/107336502636988
aragorn
May 15th, 2010 on 10:53 pm
Thanks very much for the tip. I don’t seem to have the caching problems that some are having. The covers appear right away when I sync.
Kyle
June 30th, 2010 on 9:47 pm
I figured it out… After you insert your new artwork (book cover pics) into the artwork section of each ibook you must re-sync your ipad. Right click on the ipad icon in itunes and click sync. Once you re-sync this way the new artwork will show up. This will work every time!
Robert Smith
July 5th, 2010 on 11:25 am
Excellent advice but I cannot access Get Info in the file menu?
Larry Roth
July 5th, 2010 on 10:30 pm
@Kyle, Thanks for the info!
Larry Roth
July 5th, 2010 on 10:30 pm
@Robert, is it possible that you didn’t select the book befor looking for the Get Info link? Are you on Windows or Mac OS X?