from pdf, with cover as first page

[opinsky]

My use case is the following:

* I use my Kindle Scribe for sheet music. Most of my 200 sheet music is single page PDFs.
* Because Kindle Scribe shut itself off after 5-10 minutes - which by Murphy's law happens in the middle of a performance - I've created a batch script that converts PDFs to EPUB (using Calibre ebook-convert) and set the cover of the EPUB as the first page of the PDF. This is very important because now when the Kindle shutsdown, it displays the 'cover' of the most recent document, which happens to be the sheet music I was reading.
* I then send the files to the Kindle via Amazon's send to kindle, and use Amazon terrible UI for managing Collections.

I would love to se Calibre for this workflow, but never managed to get it work properly.

My challenges are:

(1) If I send EPUB to my Kindle via USB, they get converted to something
else (AZ3 apparently) and lose the cover.

(2) to set the cover of the PDF, I have to manually get into everysingle PDF, download the first page as an image, and manually set it as the cover page on Calibre

Can I get the community help to solve (1) and (2) above?

Best regards,

OP

[Quoth]

Kindle has never used epub, though the Amazon KDP and "Send to Kindle" do, but convert it.

Scribe has the worst support for covers via USB because it's MTP.

[tomsem]

1) calibre does not copy over thumbnails for MTP devices (including Scribe). It is possible to do (you can manually copy one over if you understand the naming rules), but someone needs to give Kovid a Scribe so he can test, or someone needs to submit a PR.

2) calibre does generate cover image of first page of PDF by default. I don't even know if you can turn this behavior off. What is so special about your sheet music?

And what is purpose of having one? For when you convert to ePub?

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by tomsem

And what is purpose of having one? For when you convert to ePub?

From what the OP wrote, if he uses an Sent to Kindle converted ePub, the cover image is a copy of the only page of sheet music. So when his Scribe goes to sleep, the displayed cover image is also the page of sheet music.

I would think that the Scribe has the sleep timer setting control from the newer firmware so the OP should be able to set the timer to say 30 minutes or 1 hour which should be more than enough to play the music sheet. Settings => Device Options => Sleep Timer.

[opinsky]

Was not aware of the longer Sleep Timer - that helps a lot.

With that solved, can I organize my PDFs so that they are part of specific collections in Kindle Scribe?

Originally Posted by DNSB

From what the OP wrote, if he uses an Sent to Kindle converted ePub, the cover image is a copy of the only page of sheet music. So when his Scribe goes to sleep, the displayed cover image is also the page of sheet music.

I would think that the Scribe has the sleep timer setting control from the newer firmware so the OP should be able to set the timer to say 30 minutes or 1 hour which should be more than enough to play the music sheet. Settings => Device Options => Sleep Timer.