Touch A badly formatted book or bad Kobo Touch rendering?

[jswinden]

I just purchased from KoboBooks.com No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II by Doris Kearns Goodwin. Admittedly this ePub is not formatted very well, but take a look at the attached photo comparison between viewing this book on my Kobo Touch and my Sony 350.

On the KT I've got dozens (perhaps hundreds) of occurences of pages that contain only one paragraph. There is no apparent reason for this as there are no noticeable section breaks, plus the Sony 350 doesn't display them like this. The 350 seems to get it correct while the KT doesn't. These ridiculous page breaks also are not occuring on the mobi version I bought at Amazon.com for my Kindle. Oddly, the mobi version converted to ePub does not show them on the KT.

This is my first purchase of a kePub, and perhaps my last if this is a typical issue. Anyone else seeing this issue? Hopefully it is just a very poorly formatted ePub due to publisher ignorance or sloppiness. I'm hoping it is.

Notice the horrible right margin on the 350 and how the endnotes don't use a numerical hyperlink but instead randomly use a part of a sentence. Sometimes you just want to roll up a newspaper and smack the publisher in the nose then rub their nose in the mess they made!

[Nigol]

Does the adobe ePub perform the same way as the kepub?

[jswinden]

Not exactly sure what you are asking, but let me make a guess: Are you asking if I sideloaded the ePub I downloaded to my PC to use with my Sony to the Kobo Touch to compare it with the kePub I downloaded via WiFi directly to the KT? If so, no, but let me give that a try.

EDIT: On my KT I cannot open the Adobe ePub downloaded to my PC then sideloaded to my KT. I get a message stating the Adobe DRM is not authorized for the Adobe ID (associated with the KT I assume?). Time to strip that damn Adobe DRM and try again!!!

[Nigol]

Originally Posted by jswinden

Are you asking if I sideloaded the ePub I downloaded to my PC to use with my Sony to the Kobo Touch to compare it with the kePub I downloaded via WiFi directly to the KT? If so, no, but let me give that a try.

That is exactly what I am asking. From what I can see the ePub from adobe will render pretty much exactly like on the sony, because they use the same adobe engine. the kepub engine is different.

[jswinden]

Okay I stripped the DRM (I bought it so no big deal) and then I copied it to the Kobo Touch and it displays the way it should and similar to the Sony, but better because the KT allows more control over text.

[jswinden]

When I purchased the book I tried to use my Welcome to Kobo 20% book discount only to be told that the publisher (Simon & Schuster) would not allow it to be used.

On the bright side, this is a very well written book and I highly recommend it.

[mdclements]

Originally Posted by jswinden

To make this even worse, when i purchased the book I tried to use my Welcome to Kobo 20% book discount only to be told that the publisher (Simon & Schuster) would not allow it to be used.

On the bright side, this is a very well written book and I highly recommend it even though I cannot recommend the kePub version.

Can you tell me what font you were using and how many notches above the minimum you had your size/spacing and margins?

[jswinden]

The Adobe ePub version I sideloaded does have endnote linking capability afterall. The problem is that it is a bit flaky. One time a press on the link doesn't work but does turn the page. The next time it might work, but it always takes about 10 seconds to retrieve the endnote. That is unacceptable of course.

I notice that clicking an endnote link in the kePub will retrieve the endnote more quickly, but it also invokes the Kobo syncing mechanism which slows everything down. While the Kobo is phoning home to tell the mothership I just went to an endnote, some screen touches don't seem to work. Only after the syncing icon in the upperleft screen disappears can I press Back to return to the page whence I came. That too is unacceptable as it will take up way too much time.

[jswinden]

Originally Posted by mdclements

Can you tell me what font you were using and how many notches above the minimum you had your size/spacing and margins?

I was using a sideloaded font, Segoi UI. Out of curiousity I just switched to another sideloaded font (Lexia DaMa) and the extra page breaks went away. I tried a couple of system fonts and they too work correctly. Interesting that Segoi UI doesn't work correctly as far as page breaks go.

Font: Segoi UI
Font Size: +6
Line Spacing: +1
Margins: 0
Justification: On
Kobo Styling: Off

[Dave@Kobo]

This is a known issue when justification is on. Can you try it with left justification or off?

[jswinden]

Originally Posted by Dave@Kobo

This is a known issue when margins is set to 0.

Wow, thanks for the quick reply!

I'm happy that changing a font solved the page breaking display issue, although I like segoi UI better than Lexia DaMa the latter will do fine.

[jswinden]

Originally Posted by Dave@Kobo

This is a known issue when justification is on. Can you try it with left justification or off?

I set the Justification to Off, then to Left, then to On, but all failed to rectify the issue with Segoi UI selected as the font. Other fonts worked okay with all of the Justification settings.

[Benjamin Buford]

Originally Posted by jswinden

Okay I stripped the DRM (I bought it so no big deal) and then I copied it to the Kobo Touch and it displays the way it should and similar to the Sony, but better because the KT allows more control over text.

This is a little off-topic, but did you try to open the .kepub with Sigil or any other EPUB editor?

It would be interesting to see what difference there is between a normal EPUB and a non-standard Kobo EPUB. Perhaps one could buy regular EPUB and apply some modifications to it (source code, not just file ending) as to make the reader believe this is a .kepub, so dictionary/highlighting etc. are working. At the same time you would be retaining the original, more versatile and future-proof standard EPUB so you can read it on another device in 5 or 10 years without problems.

Still waiting for my own reader Otherwise I'd tried this myself already.

[PeterT]

A purchased kEpub, while it is still a renamed ZIP file, has the sub-files encrypted

[jswinden]

Originally Posted by Benjamin Buford

It would be interesting to see what difference there is between a normal EPUB and a non-standard Kobo EPUB. Perhaps one could buy regular EPUB and apply some modifications to it (source code, not just file ending) as to make the reader believe this is a .kepub, so dictionary/highlighting etc. are working.

I've not read anything official, but if you read the various postings in this forum written by the Kobo people there are plenty of hints that Kobo will make "dictionary/highlighting etc." available for all ePubs including sideloaded ones in a future upgrade. It might not happen, but it sure seems like they are at least seriously thinking about it.