What?

epub-thumbnailer is a simple script that tries to find a cover into an epub file and creates a thumbnail for it.

Why?

Because I want my file manager (Nautilus, Thunar, Caja, et al.) to display nice thumnails for my epub ebooks, as it does for pdf files or images, to go from this:

to this:

How to install?

Requirement

Pillow (see installation instructions)

install it with pip install Pillow or with package manager from your distro

Run the installer!

sudo python install.py install

Basically, it moves the thumbnailer script to /usr/bin and installs the necessary hooks:

In gnome2, using a gconf schema (check src/epub-thumbnailer.schemas)
In gnome3, using a thumbnailer entry (check src/epub.thumbnailer)

After installation, you might need to restart your file manager and remove cached thumbnails (~/.cache/thumbnails)

Stand-alone

This will look into the epub_file to find its cover, and will save a size px png file as output_file

epub-thumbnailer <epub_file> <output_file> <size>

Acknowledgments