Cover page can not be displayed

Thank you guys for the solution (remove the problematic books from the cloud, save originals on the Mac and copy via airdrop to iPad). But, to add something to the discussion about Apple and their motivation to solve this problem: the principal issue I had was that the books I made in iBooks Author missed the cover art on the iPad (they were showing on iPhone en Mac). So, here we are talking about books that are made with Apple software and are meant to be used on iPad that don't sync as they should. No external parties or interests, just Apple. So where is the solution, dear Apple?

The easiest methods that i found is send it through Airdrop and open in Book. It works well!

In the end, this wouldn't work for me. The files in the iCloud folder would open the Books app, but not copy into the library. The workaround I found was to load the epub files into Dropbox and try it that way. For some reason, that worked perfectly, and the books populated my Mac library. A major pain in the neck, but better than having those dire auto-generated covers. So thanks for pointing me in the right direction.

All the "fixes" being proposed here only work if your library is tiny.

I have over 10 000 pdfs and epubs combined. Airdropping or moving them to other directories to import them one by one is absolutely not an option. This is a FUNDAMENTAL issue with Apple Books. Apple will neither respond to any of this nor will they ever bother to fix it. They want us to buy from their ecosystem. Sideloading books from other sources doesn't give them any revenue, so we are quite out of luck. If you doubt this, look at the mess they've made with iTunes and the "new" music app.

Everything in it is geared towards streaming from THEIR services. As much as it pains me, I believe it's time to get off iTunes Match. Dump Apple Books and iCloud Drive. It's time for new non Apple solutions. I really hate to have to go that route but they are pushing us all in a direction that I just don't want to go.

Don't misunderstand me. I am NOT saying they did this on purpose. I do believe it's a bug. But it's been around for so long that it's easy to see that they ARE NOT in any hurry to address it. And as I've said before, there is no real incentive to do so. Except for a handful of us whining about it. Hardly a priority...

I do fully agree. With high hopes I installed the 13.4 and 10.15.4 updates across all regarding devices, just to be disappointed again, because the problem persists.

The worst part: If one of the devices gets low on free storage the book cover cache of the Book apps will be purged. If subsequently more storage is freed again, the missing covers won't be replaced.

Manually deleting and re-adding the books one at a time is user hostile.

I wholeheartedly disagree. Most ebooks take up very little storage and it is very useful to keep them around for reference, especially if you don't read fiction at all. I have a lot of design and programming related books, which you rarely read cover to cover. I also keep business and popular science (cognitive psychology, perception etc.) books in Apple Books and find myself often browsing the library.

I am a very visual person and the covers are a huge help to remember what excerpts I read and what other chapters I saw when skimming and browsing the table of contents.

Despite my book collection being smaller than 2000 it is still large enough to not justify a manual import one book at a time. I still invested the endless hours doing exactly this in December, because this bug annoyed me that much. However, after a recent reboot of my iPhone the entire library's cover art got removed again, didn't reload properly and now half of the books again show only the generic covers, which are useless to me.

Lame workarounds don't merit marking a problem "Solved". This one is far from solved.

What I don't understand is why this is not necessarily consistently a problem.

I think it's possible that deleting and replacing with updated "previews"shared among devices of an ePUB could somehow be related.

I was hoping the issue was solved with the latest update but no, still annoying AF and Apple doesn't give a sh*t about all the complaints, probably they're just too focused on providing a better gaming experience because that brings more revenues.

This is a hard nope. I’ve got 2000 + documents. Not going to tap on each one to get a cover to show. I wish I had that kind of time and patience.

There has to be a better, less hacky way to fix this.

Same here...

Yeah this worked for me too. It took me 3 days to do all 8000 files. Sucks. But it worked.

Now if I have to do it over again. That's it, I quit. I'm going back to stone tablets and chisels.

Thank you! It worked!