prs-505 restart on page formatting (epub)

[Fawn]

My sony prs-505 crashes on a ebook in epub format. At about 3/4th of the book the page formatting takes very long and after a while the reader suddenly restarts.

I have seen some other topics on this problem and I know the long reformatting and restart is caused by a bad epub file, but I really want to read e-books normally, so I don't want to delete them after reading more than a half.

Is there any kind of error log on the prs-505 you know about? It could help to find the cause of the problem.

If not, is there any software to repair/fix epub books besides 'epub-fix' of Calibre, which is very limited?

[Mark Nord]

Fawn,

short version: try a epub to epub conversion with calibre

long version: in principle a epub file is a ZIP archive holding a (very special) set of html-files along with some css style-sheets aso.
It is within the spezifications of epub-format ok to have only one large html-file holding all the text.
BUT our sony reader can't handle html-chunks larger some 200kB.
Calibre takes care of this and splits to large chunks into smaller ones.

HTH
Mark

[Fawn]

I am familiar with the archive nature of the ePub file. I can't get the ebook to work with smaller chunks. It seems to be a problem in the xml/xhtml structures the e-reader gets trouble with. (after all, this was the problem. but in the editing process I uploaded the wrong epub file to my e-reader)


It is possible to convert to .txt, it's fiction without images, so for this book plain text is ok for me, but I was looking for a more general solution.

In my opinion the behaviour of the e-reader is pretty strange. Restarting just because a text-file is not in exactly the expected structure is not that robust. I am looking for an error message/ error log in which I can find what's the troublemaker in the file. Or automatic repair/fixing software that can check and fix errors in ePub. Just for future cases, because I have trouble with the first book I read on the device.

[ScalyFreak]

Originally Posted by Fawn

It is possible to convert to .txt, it's fiction without images, so for this book plain text is ok for me, but I was looking for a more general solution.

Convert to txt or other format, then back to ePub?

Originally Posted by Fawn

Or automatic repair/fixing software that can check and fix errors in ePub. Just for future cases, because I have trouble with the first book I read on the device.

I seriously doubt it's the reader causing this, or the fact that it's an ePub. It's more likely that it's this one particular ePub, in other words, it's the book itself. How many other books do you have and what format are they?

[Fawn]

@ScalyFreak: The prs-505 can display .txt files directly, though some formatting will be missing. That was what I did before I got the ePub file to work.

I have about 20 e-books in ePub format. I just bought the e-reader and I expected to have more trouble with other files later, because the first file I tried caused me trouble.
For now I have converted all 20 e-books from ePub to ePub in Calibre. This seems to fix the problem of restarting (probably memory overload caused by ePub). It also makes the loading of the books and the pages much faster. I hope this will be enough to view most ePub files on my device without any problems.

(for people looking at this thread wondering where to get software to repair ePub books. I couldn't find any other than epub-fix by Calibre. There is another project called epubcheck, which only checks ePub files for general problems but does not fix them.)