Kobo books with no space after italics

[corroonb]

I have three Kobo books with this formatting error and I have many more previews with the same error. There are no spaces after italicised words. This affects a great many of the Gateway SF books on Kobo and makes many of them basically unreadable. I will contact Kobo asking them to fix this issue or refund me and remove all of these books from their store. I will probably get a refund but I'm certain they will go on selling faulty ebooks as they have no quality control whatsoever. Everyone should use previews to check the quality of formatting before you purchase.

[PeterT]

A couple of points..

• Kobo (along with other eBook sellers) are just that; SELLERS. They do NOT format the material, they take what is supplied to them by PUBLISHERS. Yes; there is some automated markup done to convert a book from standard ePub to kepub format.
• It would help people look into the problem if you would actually supply titles of books exhibiting issues; my cursory look through some Gateway previews did not show such issues.

[corroonb]

I suspect this is due to an older kepub conversion process as these are older releases from September 2011 or older. The specific books all have a preview ending in a hyperlink to the Kobo store. These are the books I have purchased with the error.

http://store.kobobooks.com/en-US/ebo...d-barbarians-1

http://store.kobobooks.com/en-US/ebo...roman-empire-1

http://store.kobobooks.com/en-US/ebo...-forever-war-1

I'll post a more detailed list of all the previews I've seen with this error tomorrow. These errors are not present in the Kindle editions.

Also:

The Forever War by Joe Haldeman
Forever Peace by Joe Haldeman
Blood Music by Greg Bear
Floating Worlds by Cecilia Holland
The Glamour by Christopher Priest
The Prestige by Christopher Priest
The Separation by Christopher Priest
The Killing Machine by Jack Vance
The Palace of Love by Jack Vance
The Dying Earth by Jack Vance
Emphyrio by Jack Vance
Araminta Station by Jack Vance
Ecce and the Old Earth by Jack Vance
The Face by Jack Vance
Maske: Thaery by Jack Vance
The Dragon Masters and Other Stories by Jack Vance
The Brave Free Men by Jack Vance
The Asutra by Jack Vance
The Anome by Jack Vance
Norstrilia by Cordwainer Smith
The Sword of the Lictor by Gene Wolfe

[PeterT]

Sure enough, within the first link you will see

<i><span id="kobo.31.1">Emperors and Barbarians</span></i><span id="kobo.32.1">is to provide that missing overview of European emergence: one which takes full</span>

which results in the Barbarians running directly into the is.

(Remember, previews, are actually not encrypted, and are easily examined).

[corroonb]

Is there anything they can easily do to fix this? Adjust the italic CSS?

[GeoffR]

Does the fault exist in the original Adobe DRM epub version (downloaded from the website) or is it only in the kepub version sent directly to the Kobo device?

If the fault is in the original epub then my experience is that it is better (i.e. it gets fixed faster) if I complain direct to the publisher. From what I hear Gateway books start out with a lot of OCR errors, but they are very good at fixing them when reported.

If the fault is not present in the original epub then it is purely a Kobo problem and there is no point bothering the publisher about it.

[corroonb]

I'm not on my PC with Adobe Digital Editions right now but I'll check the Adobe Epub tomorrow and report back.

[Ripplinger]

I've seen that before in some books, but in my instance it was a font issue where the italics were leaning so far over that the space just wasn't noticeable. Only once I opened the books in something like Sigil did I see that indeed a space was really there. Is there any chance that's the situation with your books? Not sure you can open up a kepub without converting it, but maybe trying to change fonts will make the italics look better.

[corroonb]

Originally Posted by Ripplinger

I've seen that before in some books, but in my instance it was a font issue where the italics were leaning so far over that the space just wasn't noticeable. Only once I opened the books in something like Sigil did I see that indeed a space was really there. Is there any chance that's the situation with your books? Not sure you can open up a kepub without converting it, but maybe trying to change fonts will make the italics look better.

As I said I'll check the epubs tomorrow but the italic and the following word register as one word (ie no space) when I try to check the dictionary.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by corroonb

Is there anything they can easily do to fix this? Adjust the italic CSS?

I would agree with PeterT here, Kobo is a seller of ebooks not a producer. Should we blame the local bookseller when an error is found in a deadtree book? Or place the blame on the people who produced the book? While it is possible that some of the issues might be an artifact of the process to Kobofy the epub, I haven's seen that happen in any of the .kepubs I have read.

If the books are not DRMed, you could always try editing to replace the </i> with a </i><space> which is easy enough to do in Sigil. There is nothing you can with the italic css to fix this.

Looking at the preview for Empires and Barbarians, there are 18 italic tags. Several of them are missing a needed space afterwards, several (e.g. Germanic- dominated) have an unneeded space before the opening <i> tag. You also have noticed that Prologue is generally not spelled "P rologue" nor is Contents spelled as "C ontents". Overall, the table of contents alone makes a fine example of the current low standards of quality control shown by most ebook publishers.

Regards,
David

[Anak]

Originally Posted by PeterT

A couple of points..

• Kobo (along with other eBook sellers) are just that; SELLERS. They do NOT format the material, they take what is supplied to them by PUBLISHERS. Yes; there is some automated markup done to convert a book from standard ePub to kepub format.
• It would help people look into the problem if you would actually supply titles of books exhibiting issues; my cursory look through some Gateway previews did not show such issues.

Originally Posted by DNSB

I would agree with PeterT here, Kobo is a seller of ebooks not a producer. Should we blame the local bookseller when an error is found in a deadtree book? Or place the blame on the people who produced the book? While it is possible that some of the issues might be an artifact of the process to Kobofy the epub, I haven's seen that happen in any of the .kepubs I have read.

Yes and no.
I agree, don't blame Kobo if it is a formatting issue that happen with regular epubs. In that case Kobo is only the vendor and has nothing to do with/influence on the layout of the book. Most likely only the publisher is to blame but may also be an artifact of the used renderer. Nevertheless, as most e-ink devices use the same Adobe Reader Mobile renderer publishers should be familiar with the existing artifacts/problem areas and work around them or avoid them completely.

I disagree if the formatting issue (or any other issue) is caused by the conversion from a regular epub to a kobofied kepub. This conversion is very rudimental.
Partly, I do understand Kobo uses a "catch all" strategy to kobofy epubs as books can be coded (CSS) by publishers in many different ways to get the desired output which is in most cases mimicking the original layout of the physical book.
If any kepub conversion issue occurs then only Kobo is to blame and not the publisher. It simply means that the kepub feature (it is a Kobo feature to distinguish them from other brands or vendors) isn't very well thought through as several quite universal "known conversion issues" happens with to many epubs. Meaning it's not an uncommon issue.

E.g. A very familiar issue is the empty line between paragraphs (p-tag) that distorts the original layout from the publisher and does not contribute to any specific Kobo reader feature. The GUI should have had a fix option for it. A "show/hide empty line between paragraphs".
BTW, this is not ment to be a "I like" or "you like" discussion. An empty line between paragraphs should only happen at the same locations where the physical book has them (the publisher has coded these in the internal CSS/HTML of the book and these empty lines are most likely to occur at quite logical postions in a book or text and do serve a purpose, e.g mark scene beak. Any code added by Kobo that overrules or ignores these positions is just wrong. By default the GUI should have, as I mentioned earlier, a "show/hide empty line between paragraphs".

Kobo tries to lure their customers to their eco system and one way to to this is by offering a kepub version of a book and promising readers additional features that regular epubs do not offer. I don't blame them for doing or trying this. But I do question if this is the right or desired way.

Other e-reader manufacturers or brands offer similar options with regular epubs without the need of a conversion or special version of a epub.
Common added features are:
• install and use custom fonts (sideloaded fonts)
• change thickness and sharpness of the font (Kobos TypeGenius feature)
• text alignment
• margin control (left, right and top and bottom)
• use ligatures
• ignore internal CSS
• and more…

The main difference is that other manufacturers are capable to "inject" or parse specific code into the - regular, non modified - epub rendering process at the hardware side to "free" these added reader options where Kobo chose to do it on the software side (offering a kepub version).
And there is no denying that this comes at a cost: several layout issues which the user has no control over.

[corroonb]

This is definitely a problem with Kobo's software. I downloaded the Adobe DRM epub of the Forever War and it displays perfectly with Adobe Digital Editions. I'll contact the publishers anyway as they should be able to get Kobo to take action whereas for me they'll probably just issue a refund and not fix this error. I have experienced this before.

[RobertJSawyer]

The SF Gateway is a project of Gollancz, Britain's largest science fiction imprint (and a division of Orion). For a great many of the books available via the SF Gateway, no electronic typesetting exists and so the ebook versions were produced by OCR scanning existing hardcopy typesetting, and then converting the resulting output to ebooks.

If the problem is uniform across Kobo editions and not present in Kindle editions, the publisher is the one to take the complaint to -- and at Gollancz the publisher (the actual person holding that title) is Malcolm Edwards. I've sent a private message to corroonb, the original poster, with Malcolm's email address. He should bring the matter to his attention.

[corroonb]

Thanks for the email address, I'll try it if I get no response from the email at the SF Gateway website. I'm pretty sure this is a Kobo problem as the issue is not present in the Adobe DRM epubs.

Predictably Kobo are not acknowledging this issue an issue at all. Do they still have any presence on this forum as others are clearly see this issue?

[PeterT]

Originally Posted by corroonb

Thanks for the email address, I'll try it if I get no response from the email at the SF Gateway website. I'm pretty sure this is a Kobo problem as the issue is not present in the Adobe DRM epubs.

Predictably Kobo are not acknowledging this issue an issue at all. Do they still have any presence on this forum as others are clearly see this issue?

I've passed this on to some Kobo contacts with a request for it to be forwarded to the content team.

Bear in mind that first level customer support normally will not acknowledge something as an issue; at best they will escalate it for more investigation.