ReadEra Cover Preview off for Premium ePubs
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I thought this was a one-off when I last downloaded a premium ePub last month (Otherside Picnic 7), but after today's Bookworm release it looks like it's a recurring issue. In ReadEra (the Android ePub reading app) the cover previews have a large white border around them for newly downloaded books. A comparison of Bookworm P5V1 and P5V2:
I also redownload a couple older bookworm volumes to see if it applied to them as well, and it seems it does. P4V5 (New on top):
Fanbook 3:
I also noticed when taking these screenshots that the new files are slightly larger than the old ones. (Quick edit: the rounding makes this look bigger than it is, the new P4V5 is only 1/4 MB larger.) The covers don't appear any differently when actually reading the volumes, it's just different when scrolling through my library.This isn't really much of a problem but I thought I might as well bring it to your attention.
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You might want to contact the ReadEra developers about this instead. We use the same rote process for creating all our ebooks, so there's really nothing on our side that should be causing this. It's been years since we've updated a cover between ebook versions too, since errors on the cover are usually caught during streaming.
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@myskaros Has that rote process changed at any point in the last 2ish months? As I mentioned the newer downloads of the older volumes are larger, different files somehow, despite having the same version number on the credits page, which I would only expect if something at JNC has changed. If everything's good here I will go to them but the covers still display normally on older JNC ePubs and ePubs from other sources so I think it's unlikely that they've changed something, rather than some tiny change by JNC just interacting weirdly with ReadEra's system.
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@Lisast No, it hasn't.
Either way, this is still an issue with this reader app, not our ebooks. The app is displaying the covers oddly for some reason. Even if we had changed anything in our process, this is the only reader that has this issue, so they should be informed in order to figure out why and decide if they want to change their program to accommodate or not.
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@myskaros
Ok I spent way too long unzipping these files to compare, opening in Calibre, making slight changes, etc., but it looks like the "culprit" might be at the end of the /OEBPS/toc.ncx files. At the end of the newer files there's a comment like<!--620d34ebe3a181f880f8d7ec-->followed by no newline at the end of file (vs. older downloads which seem to have no comment but do have a trailing newline). My guess then is that this is (somehow) messing with ReadEra. By adding that extra newline in Calibre and resaving (which also changes a bunch of the metadata and structure formatting so it's not a completely neutral comparison) I was able to get it to display correctly, for what little it was all worth. There's also a change to the JNC logo between versions but that appears to just be a metadata thing and doesn't seem to be the problem.Sorry if this comes off really stubborn (I do intend to send this to ReadEra) but on the off chance this helps I thought I'd bring it up.
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@Lisast Thanks for figuring this out, I've deployed an update that removed the comment (yes, it's a watermark) at the end of the toc.ncx. You can re-download the files now. I also think that's a really dumb reason for an app to fail to properly render a cover, you should report it.
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@chocolatkey just downloaded two volumes that released a couple of hours ago (Yashiro-kun's Guide to Going Solo Afterstory and Min-Maxing My TRPG Build In Another World V5), covers are still doing that weird white border. So either something else is the cause, or your fix reverted.
(I'm not actually bothered by it, just thought it had been fixed)
