BookNest's covers have so far been colored boxes. Real covers come from a server, and loading them well means downloading off the main thread, decoding to the on-screen size, caching in memory and on disk, and cancelling when a row scrolls away. A browser's <img> does that for you; on Android an image-loading library does: Coil 11,909 , built for Kotlin and Compose 234 , or Glide 35,023 , the View era's standard.