[sovre]

While reading another thread on another subject I got an idea about this problem.

And then I tried this:

I copied the epub file and pasted it into MS Word, and then saved it as an rtf file. I then converted the rtf file to epub using calibre and sent it once again to my Sony.

Now all words show up fine, with proper accenting. No more question marks.

But the solution is not ideal because some of the formatting was lost, and I have footnote numbers showing up in odd places and causing paragraph breaks where they should be none.