MobileRead Forums - View Single Post - The File that Broke the Kobo Glo

davidfor · 03-08-2013, 12:38 AM

I have had a play. Whoever created that ebook should be shot.

Firstly, it looks OK in Kindle for PC. But, the TOC was strange. It is there and works, but there is no text in the list, just blank lines.

The conversion in calibre seemed to work OK. But, I was surprised at how long it took. Nearly 8 minutes. But when I opened it in the calibre viewer, it was a mess. The contents page was split in strange places, there is a poem at the start that became basically one line per page. There were strange font changes later in the book.

I loaded it onto my Touch which is running 2.4.0. This had a bit of a clean-up earlier when I did a logout of my account. The book opened, and the first few pages were OK. But, when I reached page 9, it was blank and refused to go to the next page. But, it didn't hang. I could open the menu and return to the home screen. I also used the navigation bar to go to a random page. That worked except the page was blank. And I couldn't turn the page again. At that point it froze and restarted a few minutes later.

I opened the azw and epub files and looked at the files. It looks like this is a straight conversion from a Word document. All the styles are defined in each part. I wonder if this is what the Kindle converter produces. And the calibre conversion converts this to using html entities instead of characters.

Actually, I just picked it up and tried another random page. Page 502 displayed as blank and wouldn't change. But, tapping the page repeatedly, and every six taps it did the refresh flash. When I found some text, it was displayed OK. Paging through that was OK and then it reached an empty page. Tapping the screen repeated the the problem for page 502. I think what is happening is that there is so much non-text in each file, that it is confusing the page calculation algorithm used by the device.

I also opened the converted epub in Sigil. Sigil gave a "invalid epub - do you want to automatically fix it" message. I said yes, and the above HTML entities were converted to characters. I saved this and loaded it on the Touch and it opened OK. It was still badly formatted, but it works.

But, there is a better solution, which TechniSol also found. Smashwords has it for free and epub version looks to be reasonably well formatted. And my Touch has no problem with it.

03-08-2013, 12:38 AM	#5
davidfor Grand Sorcerer Posts: 24,907 Karma: 47303748 Join Date: Jul 2011 Location: Sydney, Australia Device: Kobo:Touch,Glo, AuraH2O, GloHD,AuraONE, ClaraHD, Libra H2O; tolinoepos	I have had a play. Whoever created that ebook should be shot. Firstly, it looks OK in Kindle for PC. But, the TOC was strange. It is there and works, but there is no text in the list, just blank lines. The conversion in calibre seemed to work OK. But, I was surprised at how long it took. Nearly 8 minutes. But when I opened it in the calibre viewer, it was a mess. The contents page was split in strange places, there is a poem at the start that became basically one line per page. There were strange font changes later in the book. I loaded it onto my Touch which is running 2.4.0. This had a bit of a clean-up earlier when I did a logout of my account. The book opened, and the first few pages were OK. But, when I reached page 9, it was blank and refused to go to the next page. But, it didn't hang. I could open the menu and return to the home screen. I also used the navigation bar to go to a random page. That worked except the page was blank. And I couldn't turn the page again. At that point it froze and restarted a few minutes later. I opened the azw and epub files and looked at the files. It looks like this is a straight conversion from a Word document. All the styles are defined in each part. I wonder if this is what the Kindle converter produces. And the calibre conversion converts this to using html entities instead of characters. Actually, I just picked it up and tried another random page. Page 502 displayed as blank and wouldn't change. But, tapping the page repeatedly, and every six taps it did the refresh flash. When I found some text, it was displayed OK. Paging through that was OK and then it reached an empty page. Tapping the screen repeated the the problem for page 502. I think what is happening is that there is so much non-text in each file, that it is confusing the page calculation algorithm used by the device. I also opened the converted epub in Sigil. Sigil gave a "invalid epub - do you want to automatically fix it" message. I said yes, and the above HTML entities were converted to characters. I saved this and loaded it on the Touch and it opened OK. It was still badly formatted, but it works. But, there is a better solution, which TechniSol also found. Smashwords has it for free and epub version looks to be reasonably well formatted. And my Touch has no problem with it.