Kepub - how does it work?

[Lynx-lynx]

I'm a new Kobo ereader person (Glo), although I have been purchasing Kobo books for quite some time - so pardon my ignorance on the following matters.

Below is a Kepub file - which relates to a Kobo book I purchased.

eb7c32c6-5004-4dc0-b1d8-26c59fd3b505

My questions are:

-Is a Kobo ebook/app the only way of reading this file?

- Can Calibre import this file format? (I can't work out how)

- Is this file format somehow convertible so that Calibre can understand it?

Am I right in thinking that if, for some reason, you can only download a kepub file (say because the ADE link is stuffed) that you can't ever actually get the book into Calibre and clean it, and convert it etc

[Lynx-lynx]

Does there need to be Kepub sticky?

[PeterT]

You can ONLY read kEpubs via a Kobo device / application. I think it is safe to say you are also required to download the kEpub either via WiFi from a device, or via Kobo Desktop to a PC / Mac.

The majority of kEpubs are DRM encumbered, and to the best of my knowledge there are NO tools available to remove DRM from these.

So no; calibre can not import / manage kEpubs.

[Cdesja5]

Originally Posted by Lynx-lynx

I'm a new Kobo ereader person (Glo), although I have been purchasing Kobo books for quite some time - so pardon my ignorance on the following matters.

Below is a Kepub file - which relates to a Kobo book I purchased.

eb7c32c6-5004-4dc0-b1d8-26c59fd3b505

My questions are:

-Is a Kobo ebook/app the only way of reading this file?

- Can Calibre import this file format? (I can't work out how)

- Is this file format somehow convertible so that Calibre can understand it?

Am I right in thinking that if, for some reason, you can only download a kepub file (say because the ADE link is stuffed) that you can't ever actually get the book into Calibre and clean it, and convert it etc

You can download the "epub" to your PC from the Kobo website and run it through Calibre; you may already know that... Books downloaded directly to the reader itself are "kepubs" and can't be converted/cleaned in Calibre.

[stewacide]

One kepub I'd purchased from the Kobo Store was messed up, in that it'd skip erratically between chapters/sections out of proper order, making it impossible to read the book. When I downloaded the Adobe ePub from Kobo the book worked fine. If I were a less technical person I would have been really upset about that.

I really don't see why they bother with kepub at all. The chapter page count is annoying / much less useful than how generic ePubs are handled, plus the possibility of show-stopping conversion bugs like I experienced above.

[DomesticExtremis]

Originally Posted by Lynx-lynx

I'm a new Kobo ereader person (Glo), although I have been purchasing Kobo books for quite some time - so pardon my ignorance on the following matters.

Below is a Kepub file - which relates to a Kobo book I purchased.

eb7c32c6-5004-4dc0-b1d8-26c59fd3b505

My questions are:

-Is a Kobo ebook/app the only way of reading this file?

- Can Calibre import this file format? (I can't work out how)

- Is this file format somehow convertible so that Calibre can understand it?

Am I right in thinking that if, for some reason, you can only download a kepub file (say because the ADE link is stuffed) that you can't ever actually get the book into Calibre and clean it, and convert it etc

I've been tinkering a bit.I downloaded a couple of kobo kepubs (DRM free ones - Dostoyevsky's The Idiot and E-book Formatting for Novelists).
I added them to my library on the Kobo site, then got them to the device via a sync.

Calibre can see them on the device, but cannot open them or add them to the library.
It can however save them to disk.

To do this, attach your device, open calibre and under the Device listing, select the book and click 'Save to disk'. Set a location on your hard drive and it will write a file with a funny name.
Calibres ebook viewer won't open it until you rename it to have an epub (or.kepub.epub) extension.

You can unzip the file too, which has some interesting contents -
(epub after expanding to 'kepub' directory):

tree kepub
kepub
├── content.opf
├── css
│** └── kobo-android.css
├── js
│** └── kobo-android.js
├── META-INF
│** ├── calibre_bookmarks.txt
│** └── container.xml
├── mimetype
├── OEBPS
│** ├── coverImage.png
│** ├── coverPage.html
│** ├── epub.css
│** ├── part0.html
│** ├── part1.html
│** ├── part2.html
│** └── part3.html
├── rights.xml
└── toc.ncx

The 'calibre-bookmarks.txt' has clearly been added by calibre, so I'm not sure how this compares to the original downloaded kepub - but there's some really interesting bits in there and some wierd formatting inside the html itself.

Perhaps somebody with better knowledge of epubs and css than me might be able to glean some useful information from it.