How to add a cover page to an EPUB 2.0 book?

EPUB 2.0 does not offer any special specification to define a cover page. So the first page of book content is the cover of the book.

If you don't want the cover page (the first page in "spine" list) to show up in the linear reading flow, you can use the linear="no" attribute to declare it as an auxiliary content. Here is a good example of a "spine" list with a cover page:

  <manifest>
    <item id="navigation" href="/navigation.xml" media-type="application/x-dtbncx+xml"/>
    <item id="cover" href="/cover.xhtml" media-type="application/xhtml+xml"/>
    <item id="content" href="/content.xhtml" media-type="application/xhtml+xml"/>
    <item id="Row-Your-Boat" href="/Row-Your-Boat.jpg" media-type="image/jpeg"/>
  </manifest>
  <spine toc="navigation">
    <itemref idref="cover" linear="no"/>
    <itemref idref="content"/>
  </spine>

You can also create the "cover.xhtml" page to display a single cover picture:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<!-- cover.xhtml
  Copyright (c) FYIcenter.com 
-->
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
  <head>
    <title>Cover Page</title>
    <meta name="viewport" content="width=600, height=360"/>
  </head>
  <body>
<div><img src="/Row-Your-Boat.jpg" width="600" height="360" alt="Row Your Boat"/></div>
  </body>
</html>

If you want to see an example of picture cover page, you can download this EPUB 2.0 book, Row-Your-Boat-2.0.epub. Unzip it to see its files.

⇒ EPUB 2.0 Metadata in Calibre Book Library

⇐ EPUB 2.0 Metadata - dc:description Element

⇑ EPUB 2.0 Package Metadata

⇑⇑ EPUB Tutorials