Well, then maybe that's the problem. The New York Times article only has one "drawing" in it, but perhaps the actual format of the article is more like a drawing than actual text. The Google book . . . well, I guess it's a scan of the text. I don't how Google works. FWIW, I did try downloading the book as text only, again from Google, but that also failed. I can upload that and see what you'all think. But thanks for that clarification, David. Something to consider when looking to download books. Makes you wonder if all the Google books will be problematic. I also tried using Calibre on books from an open source internet archive
http://www.archive.org/details/openlibrary and that also failed, even when I selected a PDF version.