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Getting and setting the cover image from an EPUB file

  • Tagged with epub
  • Posted

I’ve only done this with a small number of EPUB files, but it seems to work so far.

How to get the cover from an EPUB file

  1. Find the content.opf file.

  2. Look for an <item properties="cover-image" …> element in the <manifest>, which will point to the path to the cover image, for example:

    <item
  id="cover-image"
  properties="cover-image"
  href="media/cover.png"
  media-type="image/png"/>

How to set the cover in an EPUB file

  1. Add the cover image to the EPUB package.
  2. Find the content.opf file.

  3. Add an <item properties="cover-image" …> element in the <manifest> which points to the cover image you’ve added:

    <item
  id="cover-image"
  properties="cover-image"
  href="media/cover.png"
  media-type="image/png"/>

  4. Add a <meta name="cover" …> element in the <metadata> which points to the <manifest> element you just added:

    <meta name="cover" content="cover-image"/>

Don’t use pandoc

While researching this question, I asked Claude hwo to solve this. It suggested using pandoc

pandoc input.epub -o output.epub --epub-cover-image=cover.png

I was already dubious because pandoc is a big dependency to add to an app, but even more so when I realised that this mangles the formatting.