[DoctorOhh]

Originally Posted by marst

After doing a few searches here for "AZW1" I have the feeling that the format is troublesome in the best of circumstances, but perhaps I've misread...

The azw1 format or topaz is an amazing format used by Amazon for automatically scanning in old books. When read by a Kindle app or device the result is usually an excellent representation of the original book.

You can read up on the creation of topaz from the person (screen-name: Fluffy) who created it in posts 800-812 and on his blog, archived here. Very interesting read.

Originally Posted by marst

Opened in calibre, the book appears not as AZW or AZW1 but as HTMLZ.

I'm sure the plugin you got from Apprentice Alf packaged it this way when you added it to calibre.

Originally Posted by marst

I can convert it successfully to EPUB format, but the problems have already occurred. Examples:

Some numerals are coming out incorrectly. Text such as Essay 10 comes out as Essay io. The text August 22 and 29, 2005 is rendered as August 22 and zz, zoos. All italics are lost. Those are the errors I spotted just within the first couple of pages. There must be a ton of errors throughout the book.

The errors you are seeing is the result of the OCR scan of the book when it was created. Since the book is essentially a series of glyphs or images, which when viewed by Amazon devices or apps looks very close to the original, the only thing the OCR text was used for (according to its creator) was search functionality. Amazon made no attempt to proof any of this text. The text from some topaz books is great and the text from others is chock-full of errors.

Originally Posted by marst

Is there something I might do to improve this? Thanks in advance...

As already suggested, if you want an epub, your only choice is to manually proof the book yourself.

Your other choices are to read them on your Kindle or Kindle App, find the stand alone tools and read the extracted glyphs in their original book form via Firefox, or convert those glyphs to PDF.