Bahá’í eBook Covers
Project first published in 2011:
Ever since the release of the iPad, I've been doing most of my reading digitally. As I started building my personal e-library of Bahá'í sacred texts, I realized how difficult it was to find high-quality cover art for the books -- never mind a unified set of high-resolution art. I decided to create my own, fulfilling my goals of cohesion, beauty, readability, quality, and accessibility.
This has become one of my most popular projects, gaining international recognition particularly after I partnered with Bahá'í eBooks Publishing to bring my covers to their vast collection of Bahá'í sacred texts. You can download the entire set of covers for free here, or see and download all the individual covers below.
The Philosophy
More and more people are downloading Bahá’í texts, to read on a variety of screens -- their computers, e-readers, tablets, smartphones, and more. I wanted to create a beautiful and unified set of cover art that could be used with these digital copies, that would be freely and easily available to anyone who wanted to use them on their devices.
To read more about the philosophy behind the design, check out this blog post.
The Covers
You can download all of the covers in one .zip file here, or download them individually by clicking on the thumbnails below:
Bahá’u’lláh
‘Abdu’l-Bahá
Shoghi Effendi
The Universal House of Justice
The Báb
The Dawn-Breakers, by Nabíl-i-A`zam
Bahá’í Prayers
You may notice that a few texts (The Dawn-Breakers, for example) have multiple options; while I wanted to make sure that the covers made a consistent set, there were some for which I wanted to try alternate ideas, or for which I had a memory of an original printed copy I wanted to try and replicate. Feel free to mix and match, and create a set of your own preference!
How to Use Them
The process to attach these covers to your eBooks will vary based on the software you’re using. For example, if you use the iBooks software for iOS (iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch), you can change the cover art for your downloaded books in iTunes on your computer (tutorial here), and sync it back to your iOS device for reading.
If you are using ePub files, and you want to edit the book files themselves, Sigil is a great cross-platform ePub formatting and editing software I’ve come across; you can use it to make deeper edits to your books, including changing the cover art on the inside of the book as well as the outside. Calibre is another great free software for editing eBook files of all types.
Whatever the format, the covers are available for download in standard .jpg format, so they should work fine with any software that lets you use image files as covers. Feel free to contact me with any questions, and enjoy!
Also: In 2012 I partnered with Bahá’í eBooks Publishing, a fantastic site with beautifully-formatted Bahá’í eBooks, to bring my cover art to their texts. They’ve rolled out special editions of many of their books with my covers, and you can download them (books + covers) from their site, for free (including an exclusive edition of The Priceless Pearl with a custom cover). There are more individual covers on my site, but keep an eye out for new texts appearing from Bahá’í eBooks Publishing, where you can have the best of both covers and text, all without having to edit your eBooks yourself!