Touch Cover image frustrations

Apologies, as this is a bit more of a rant than a question, though there is a question at the end.

I use my kobo purely for reading epubs, and have been a bit frustrated by the bug whereby any the cover image for the book is squeezed horizontally and has two white margins added to it. I even tried stretching the covers horizontally in the epub so that when they get squeezed they should revert to normal, but that didn't work.

In the end, I wrote a script that generated covers for each book, and replaced them in the kobo image directory so the kobo wouldn't generate new covers and just use the ones I created. All was well, until my library grew to around 3000 books. Now, when I create all the files that are needed (4 for each book, I believe), the device runs out of inodes. This means that I am back with ugly squeezed covers, despite the fact that my library is under 1GB (with both books and covers).

Is there another fix for this that I am not recognising? For example, is it possible to reformat the kobo drive to ext3 so I can hardlink all the cover files to one image, thus saving inodes? Or does anyone know if this is even on kobo's radar to fix.