See this thread:
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...b+circumvented
If you have a book that has no drm, you can just change the extension from epub to zip, the ebook files are inside this zip. What you will be interested in will be a lot of html or xhtml files. You can edit them with a text editor and see what encoding and charset is used. After correcting them, you will have to repack the files and rename to epub again.
It is quite a lot of work, especially if you haven't done it before.
Obviously with commercial books, we shouldn't have to do anything in order to read them except for loading them on our reader. Moreover, because of drm, it is obvious that we are not even allowed to. And I still haven't got any money back, or been sent a corrected version of my book or even a promise that one is forthcoming...
Waterstones is not going to see any of my money ever again as long as this is not resolved. That I managed to resolve it myself thanks to more helpful and knowledgeable people that the waterstones' support team has nothing to do with it!