Stanza Crashes when trying to Download multiple books using Calibre

[tochill]

Hi, I am having a bit of a problem with the Stanza and the download all function. Every time i try to use it, it crashes.
If i try to manually download books as long as there are not more than two concurrent downloads, it mostly works. But if three books are concurrently downloading it crashes.
I tried it both with Calibre running as an online catalog and as Shared Book as well as with a catalog that i am hosting on my website that i created by using calibre2web.
The books were converted to epub by Stanza desktop. When i try other catalogs, the download all function appears to work fine.
Any suggestions?

[ilovejedd]

Unfortunately, the problem is with Stanza and not Calibre. Or perhaps it may have to do with the limited RAM on the iPhone. The Calibre catalog contains quite a bit of metadata that others might not have. I don't think Calibre resizes the covers either so that's another source of excess bytes.

A temporary stopgap would be to restart the iPhone to clear the memory.

[itimpi]

I originally created the Calibre2Web script just so that I could access my books "over-the-air" and avoid having to many books on my iPhone at the same time. As a result I tend to just download books as I am about to read them so do not use the "Download All" facility in Stanza.

I agree that ideally this issue should be fixed at the Stanza level, However, if the Download All functionality works OK with some catalogs, but not the eBooks converted to ePub by Stanza it might be worth looking more closely at the ePub files themselves. The amount of data contained in the Catalog entries is relatively limited and would be unlikely to be an issue even within the limited RAM available on the iPhone, so I would expect any issues to be with the actual content within the ePub. Maybe Calibre tends to aggravate some issue in Stanza because of the way it generates the ePub files? I am sure if any such issues could be identified, then appropriate changes to Calibre would rapidly be made to help with them.

[tochill]

I did some more testing. I t appears that epub's created with Stanza are the one's that crash versus one's created with calibre. The reason i like the Stanza created one's is there chapter detection is superior to the one in calibre. Not sure what do do to fix the issue.

[kovidgoyal]

Originally Posted by tochill

The reason i like the Stanza created one's is there chapter detection is superior to the one in calibre. Not sure what do do to fix the issue.

You're kidding me

[tochill]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

You're kidding me

Sorry, didn't mean to offend, i love your product. For some reason it just said unknown chapter and didn't notice all of the splits as well as Stanza, although that may have more to do with my lack of knowledge on how to use XPath properly. But by using Stanza and Calibre together it has worked out great!

I figured out the problem based on some suggestions above, apparently all of the covers needed to be reloaded. It took forever but now it works. I am not sure why it would let me do two at a time without crashing as apposed to crashing right away.

[kovidgoyal]

Nah I'm not offended, feel free to use whatever solution works best for you I was just curious to see if Stanza actually does something calibre doesn't

[ilovejedd]

Originally Posted by tochill

I did some more testing. I t appears that epub's created with Stanza are the one's that crash versus one's created with calibre. The reason i like the Stanza created one's is there chapter detection is superior to the one in calibre. Not sure what do do to fix the issue.

Interesting. The complaint is usually the other way around. I seem to recall reading a thread on the Stanza forums and the staff recommended using Calibre instead of Stanza desktop for conversion. Oh well... Different strokes for different folks and all that...