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Old 01-21-2010, 10:18 AM   #1
mag1
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Strange  character appearing throughout e-book text

Hello everyone,

I'm new to this forum so please forgive me if this question has already come up. I recently bought the Night's Dawn trilogy of books by Peter F Hamilton in EPUB format from Waterstones. The first two books appear just fine when I view and read them in Adobe Digital Editions (can no longer use my Sony PRS-505 due to a progressive disability - MND/ALS). However, the text in the last book The Naked God seems to be corrupted with the  character which appears throughout the book replacing whatever should be there. I tried contacting Waterstone's customer service department by e-mail asking for help but after two weeks all they did was refund my money without a single word of explanation. I've not downloaded any further books from their website yet as I am unsure if the problem exists at their end or mine.

Have any of you folks experienced a similar problem with missing characters being substituted by the  character? Were you able to resolve the problem? Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

Kind regards
Mark
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Old 01-21-2010, 10:30 AM   #2
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Hello Mark and welcome to Mobileread.

I had a similar problem with another book I bought from Waterstones - the  character kept appearing (usually at the top of the page), which wouldn't bother me that much if the book didn't have a lot of other, more serious problems as well, like every french word in there being just garbled random letters.

I'm pretty sure the  character is not a problem at your end - ebooks should be designed so that they can be correctly read by anyone, end of story.

I'm very surprised you got your money back, because I am now in my third week of correspondence with them about my book and have not received a useful response yet...
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Old 01-22-2010, 11:23 AM   #3
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This is a problem with the encoding specified. I've seen it myself a couple of times.
If your ebook is unencrypted, take a look at the xml specification at the top of each file. If the text was edited as UTF-8 but the encoding says
Code:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
then you can get strange characters.
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Old 01-22-2010, 12:01 PM   #4
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Charleski, that was exactly it! They had charset utf-8 and encoding ISO-8859-1!
I changed it to utf-8 and the  on the beginning of chapters disappeared, and all accented characters are not gibberish anymore! Thank you!

I get really angry when I think that it was a commercial book! (I run it through the epub validator, and even after me fixing the encoding there were other errors present!) I still have got no useful answer from waterstones, and of course not only should I not have to tamper with a purchased book, but I'm actually not allowed to! (Many thanks to all the people that provided us with ways to get round evil drm, once again!)
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Old 01-22-2010, 03:17 PM   #5
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Thank you omk3 for the welcome!

Thank you Charleski for that information but as I'm new to all of this I think I might need some further help. How do I view the XML specification of the EPUB file? As the book was bought commercially from Waterstones I would assume that it is encrypted and protected by DRM. Do I need a special piece of software to view and modify the specification? Do I need another piece of software to first strip out the DRM? Is that possible? Would it be possible please to detail the steps required to correct the encoding and what software would be required? Thank you.
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Old 01-23-2010, 03:12 PM   #6
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See this thread: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...b+circumvented

If you have a book that has no drm, you can just change the extension from epub to zip, the ebook files are inside this zip. What you will be interested in will be a lot of html or xhtml files. You can edit them with a text editor and see what encoding and charset is used. After correcting them, you will have to repack the files and rename to epub again.
It is quite a lot of work, especially if you haven't done it before.

Obviously with commercial books, we shouldn't have to do anything in order to read them except for loading them on our reader. Moreover, because of drm, it is obvious that we are not even allowed to. And I still haven't got any money back, or been sent a corrected version of my book or even a promise that one is forthcoming... Waterstones is not going to see any of my money ever again as long as this is not resolved. That I managed to resolve it myself thanks to more helpful and knowledgeable people that the waterstones' support team has nothing to do with it!
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Old 01-23-2010, 06:30 PM   #7
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https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=39423

Use that URL instead and you won't end up with highlighted words.
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Old 01-23-2010, 06:32 PM   #8
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Oops!
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Old 01-26-2010, 08:46 AM   #9
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I agree wholeheartedly. Users shouldn't have to edit commercial books just to make them readable.

The fault actually lies with Macmillan. They're the ones who publish Peter F. Hamilton, and they also published the books I found to be faulty. Write to them to complain and tell them to fire the idiot they have who can't follow basic principles.

To make the edits, first unencrypt your book as detailed in the thread linked above. There are a couple of ways to fix the book, both are free. Be sure to work on a copy of the book just in case.

The simplest is to install Sigil. Just open the epub in Sigil and save it, don't do anything else. Sigil strips out a lot of code that isn't strictly necessary, and will also strip out the faulty encoding parameter. This should work fine with faulty English-language books from Macmillan, but sometimes Sigil can mess up the ToC.

The alternative, which involves less radical change to the original code, is to open the book in an application like epubtweak, which is free and a convenient way of looking inside the epub. Go through the list of files, selecting each .html file and clicking 'Edit File', which will make it come up in Notepad. Then just take a look at the first line of the file and change
encoding="ISO-8859-1"
to
encoding="utf-8"
then save the file and move on to the next.
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Old 01-26-2010, 01:27 PM   #10
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Mine was published by randomhouse... And it was not the first epub with errors I buy, though it was the only one with this specific error. Others had a lot of ocr mistakes here and there.
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Old 01-26-2010, 01:38 PM   #11
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Mine was published by randomhouse... And it was not the first epub with errors I buy, though it was the only one with this specific error. Others had a lot of ocr mistakes here and there.
These are very different errors. OCR errors are due to a lack of proofreading while incorrect headers is pure stupidity.

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Old 01-26-2010, 01:39 PM   #12
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I know. But both are because of lack of proper care.
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Old 01-26-2010, 01:53 PM   #13
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The alternative, which involves less radical change to the original code, is to open the book in an application like epubtweak, which is free and a convenient way of looking inside the epub. Go through the list of files, selecting each .html file and clicking 'Edit File', which will make it come up in Notepad. Then just take a look at the first line of the file and change
encoding="ISO-8859-1"
to
encoding="utf-8"
then save the file and move on to the next.
Actually, it would be a lot easier to edit the html files using Notepad++. You can open them all in different tabs and then do a search/replace among all open tabs. So once loaded, it's just a single simple search/replace and then a save all and done except for putting them back into the ePub.
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Old 01-26-2010, 02:15 PM   #14
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I know. But both are because of lack of proper care.
I don't think any amount of care will fix stupidity or ignorance. It takes education, not care.

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Old 01-26-2010, 02:19 PM   #15
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I don't disagree with you there. But if anyone ever cared enough to try and (proof)read the finished ebook before selling it, they would discover both the ocr errors and the stupid encoding one...
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