diff --git a/resources/jacket/template.xhtml b/resources/jacket/template.xhtml
index 17d0493a82..671ca5a04d 100644
--- a/resources/jacket/template.xhtml
+++ b/resources/jacket/template.xhtml
@@ -38,9 +38,12 @@
         <hr class="cbj_kindle_banner_hr" />
         <!-- 
         In addition you can add code to show the values of custom columns here.
-        The value is available as _column_name and the title as _column_name_label.
-        For example, if you have a custom column with label #genre, you can add it to
-        this template with _genre_label and _genre. Note that the # is replaced by an underscore.
+        The value is available as _column_name and the title as
+        _column_name_label.  For example, if you have a custom column with
+        label #genre, you can add it to this template with _genre_label and
+        _genre. Note that the # is replaced by an underscore. For example
+        
+        <div><b>{_genre_label}:</b> {_genre}</div>
         -->
 
         <div class="cbj_comments">{comments}</div>
diff --git a/src/calibre/ebooks/oeb/transforms/jacket.py b/src/calibre/ebooks/oeb/transforms/jacket.py
index 987fe0ce86..ede34ef17c 100644
--- a/src/calibre/ebooks/oeb/transforms/jacket.py
+++ b/src/calibre/ebooks/oeb/transforms/jacket.py
@@ -16,6 +16,7 @@ from calibre.ebooks.BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup
 from calibre.ebooks.oeb.base import XPath, XHTML_NS, XHTML
 from calibre.library.comments import comments_to_html
 from calibre.utils.date import is_date_undefined
+from calibre.ebooks.chardet import strip_encoding_declarations
 
 JACKET_XPATH = '//h:meta[@name="calibre-content" and @content="jacket"]'
 
@@ -180,10 +181,14 @@ def render_jacket(mi, output_profile,
             except:
                 pass
 
+        args['_genre_label'] = args.get('_genre_label', '')
+        args['_genre'] = args.get('_genre', '')
+
         generated_html = P('jacket/template.xhtml',
                 data=True).decode('utf-8').format(**args)
 
         # Post-process the generated html to strip out empty header items
+
         soup = BeautifulSoup(generated_html)
         if not series:
             series_tag = soup.find(attrs={'class':'cbj_series'})
@@ -206,7 +211,8 @@ def render_jacket(mi, output_profile,
             if hr_tag is not None:
                 hr_tag.extract()
 
-        return soup.renderContents(None)
+        return strip_encoding_declarations(
+                soup.renderContents('utf-8').decode('utf-8'))
 
     from calibre.ebooks.oeb.base import RECOVER_PARSER