# A FictionBook With Its Cover Inside It

Ilse Brandt-Nakamura

## One. The Blob at the Bottom

FictionBook has no container, so an image has to live inside the XML itself: base64 in a binary element at the end of the file, referenced by id from a coverpage element in the description.

That makes the cover unavoidable for a parser - it must decode the whole document to reach it - and it makes the file grow by a third of the image's real size.