Make Your iBook Covers Look Beautiful, Using Your Own Custom Images

Apple enthusiasts @TUAW have today detailed how you can change the appearance of an iBook cover on your iPad, using your own custom images.

TUAW editor Michael Grothaus details the process below. Note: The following method only works with the more than 30,000 freely downloadable books available from Project Gutenberg.

1. Find a cover image. For mine, I used a photo I took while on a trip in Russia of a statue of Leo Tolstoy.

2. Open the photo in any image editing software. Don’t crop it yet, give yourself some space to adjust the titles and image.

3. Create your title: overlay the text you want on the photo. I just added the title of the book and the author’s name.

4. Have everything looking the way you want? Good. Now what you need to do is crop the image to give it the aspect ratio of other iBookstore ebooks. As you’ll notice, in my first attempt I came in just a bit short at 414 pixels wide by 600 pixels high. Changing it to 420×599 pixels will give you a more exact match to other iBookstore ebooks covers.

5. After you’ve cropped the image, double check that you don’t have to readjust any of the text you wrote. Then, if everything looks good, flatten the image into a single layer.

6. Save your image as a high quality JPEG file.

7. Now all you have to do is add the image to the ebook file in your iTunes library using the steps listed below and boom! you’ve got your custom book cover.

To add the custom image you just created to the iBook file in your iTunes library, simply follow the steps below:

1. In your iTunes library, select the Books category in the source list.

2. Select any book that shows it has no cover, right click on it, and select “Get Info.”

3. Select the “Artwork” tab.

4. Drag and drop any image into the white box on the artwork tab and click Okay. Voila! You’ve just added a custom cover to your ebook.

Cool, eh?

[via @TUAW]