[KevinH]

Hi,

I just bought two new epub books from the Sony store and had trouble with them on non-Sony readers that do support Adobe DE epubs. I am not sure how pervasive this problem is, but it hit 2 out of 2 for me.

Captain's Fury by Jim Butcher
Princeps' Fury by Jim Butcher

It seems the software that Sony is using to create epubs (which are zip archives) is faulty in a dangerous way.

In both cases using unzip -t to test the epubs I find that at least one of the central directory filenames is different from the name of the file given in the local headers.

In both cases the local headers name is correct but the central directory name is wrong (mangled).

This is actually a security violation for zip archives since an attacker can modify the path and name in the local headers to force the unzip software to unpack the file into some bad location. All "unzip" programs should always default to the name of the file as given in the central directory of the zip archive.

Unfortunately, if you did that in this case both epubs would be broken since the file names would never fit with the toc entries or anything else.

In fact, if you run Adobe's own epubcheck-1.0.5 (latest development version) on the epubs in question (ignoring all of the can't decrypt anything messages) you see the following:

ERROR: /Users/kbhend/Desktop/ebook_pieces/Captain's_Fury.epub: OPS/XHTML file OEBPS/captainsfury_ch50.html is missing

and

ERROR: /Users/kbhend/Desktop/ebook_pieces/Princeps'_Fury.epub: image file OEBPS/butc_9781440642753_oeb_044_r1.jpg is missing

So Sony is not bothering to even check if the epubs they have created are correct.

This is not good. I have now bought things from a number of ebook stores and have found **terrible** quality control of the ebooks across a number of stores including:

- incorrect special (unicode) characters for the first couple of chapters used in Bernard Cornwall's latest book "The Burning Land"

- multi-column text used as a simple table in Outliers (Gladwell) that have non-properly (or even close!) layout in the ebook

- ereader styles books with the most horrible and non-spec usage of pml tags

- and now faulty epubs from the new Sony Store that do not pass epubcheck (and more importantly software that dangerously uses and unpacks things using local headers for paths and file names instead of the central directories version).

Sony should fix this asap!

KevinH