PDF book covers

[Reader101]

Hi,
It would be really useful if you could automatically read the first page of PDF books and generate an image to use as the book's cover. (I believe Calibre does this if it cannot find the book in the database).

All my books are in PDF format and the the lookup plugin is unable to find cover images for most books. Adding images manually is extremely time consuming on a tablet.

Thanks for the app.

[kweckwor]

Hi Reader101,

Right now, eLibrary Manager only really understands ePub books. It treats non-ePub books (like PDF) as "black box" and doesn't access the contents. I'll take look and see if I can do that without resorting to third-party libraries, which I've been mostly avoiding up to now. I can't promise anything until I have a chance to do my homework on the topic, but I'll see how possible it might be.

However, since you mention that you use calibre, there is another option available that will allow you to load PDF metadata (i.e. book information) from calibre into eLibrary Manager. If you configure calibre to "Save to disk" with separate cover and OPF files in addition to the PDF file, my app will read the metadata (including cover) and load that into the app library.

You can see instructions on how to do that in the online documentation at http://kpwsite.com/home/content/eLibrary/guide_book_types.html. My video tutorial (Part 2) at https://youtu.be/-y3J6QQ1_eg also demonstrates this at around the 13:46 minute mark. I'll list some of the key points here:

• In calibre, set the Saving books to disk preferences to enable the "Save cover separately" and "Save metadata in a separate OPF file" options.
• Invoke the "Save to disk" action to export your PDF books to your device. That should create 3 files for each book, of types PDF, OPF and JPEG.
• In eLibrary Manager, scan for books as normal, and book information and cover should get loaded into the app library based on the data contained in the extra files saved.

A couple of things I want to point out though:

• Unfortunately, the "Save cover separately" and "Save metadata in a separate OPF file" options in calibre only apply to the "Save to disk" action and they have no effect on the regular "Send to device" action that you are probably used to using. Therefore, to produce the extra OPF and cover files, you need to use "Save to disk".
• On one of my devices, the calibre "Save to disk" action does not seem to work when I target any drives on that device. So when loading books through "Save to disk" on this device, I need to save to my computer first, and then copy manually to the device as a separate step. I'm not sure why this happens - I assume its just something weird with how calibre and Android (5.1.1 is the version I'm running) interact with mounted drives through Windows. On my phone, the operation works just fine, so it doesn't seem to be a global problem. But I thought I'd mention it just in case you run across the same issue.

Please let me know if you have any questions.

Thanks.

Karl