One of two epubs didn't transfer

[Gregg Bell]

I just got a Sony PRS300 and I transfered two epubs from the latest Calibre to the Ereader. One transferred fine, but the other when you click on it in the PRS300 it shows shows "Page Error." (and it doesn't show a toc). The book is American Tragedy and it opens fine in Calibre's Ebook Viewer. (I'll attach it.) Any ideas why it's not opening and what I could do to make it open properly? (I thought of just dragging and dropping the file onto the Sony icon on the Desktop but don't want to screw things up. I've already had one Sony get screwed up.) Thanks.

[kovidgoyal]

do an epub to epub conversion.

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by Gregg Bell

The book is American Tragedy and it opens fine in Calibre's Ebook Viewer. (I'll attach it.)

Moderator Notice
Please do not post copyright works to MobileRead. Attachment deleted.

(An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser is in copyright in life+70 countries until 1st January 2016, and in the US until 1st January 2021. Of course, it's been out of copyright in Canada since 1st January 1996, but MobileRead now waits for both life+70 and US copyrights to expire.)

[Gregg Bell]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

do an epub to epub conversion.

Thanks kovid. It worked.

Do I have to do the epub to epub conversion all the time now or was it just because it was the Sony's quirkiness or the .epub's?

[PeterT]

More than likely the ePub itself.

[Gregg Bell]

Originally Posted by PeterT

More than likely the ePub itself.

Thanks

[JSWolf]

Calibre's viewer is much more forgiving of errors then ADE.

If you can, take the original defective ePub and load it into the eBook editor and validate it and see the errors that are shown.

[cybmole]

page error on an old sony reader often means that you have a segment which is >260K.
if that is the case then ade will choke on it also ( for ade 1.7.2. anyway - not sure about the newer versions)
a calibre conversion on default settings will split down to that max size for you.

[Gregg Bell]

Thanks JS and cybmole. Loaded the book into the Calibre editor. It showed stuff like 'html toc not in spine' but three files were larger than 260Kb so I think that was it. Interesting. Now I'll have to pay attention to what the file size is. Most novels are way bigger than 260K so I guess I'll be doing a lot of converting if I want to use the Sony. Is the Kindle Touch (the newest one) able to handle bigger file sizes?

[davidfor]

The 260KB size refers to the internal files. Older versions of Adobe epub reader code couldn't handle these properly. So, a novel gets split into smaller internal files, usually one file per chapter. And long chapters need to be split at some other point.

For newer epub readers, this is not as important. They seem to handle them OK, but it can cause performance problems. As a test, I edited a book I with 30 chapters into a single file. This was over 1MB in size. On my Kobo Glo, it work fined. But, turning the page became slower as I went through it. Towards the end it was taking close to 30 seconds.

I don't have a Kindle but my understanding is that they don't have a problem like this.

[cybmole]

most novels from most sources come already split into chapters though, and it is rare for a single chapter to exceed 260k
i routinely run all new books added through a calibre epub to epub convert anyway which takes care of that and does other customization to my taste. calibre can add custom css to every book and it can run preset find/replaces searches also if needed.

I have recombined previously split mega chapters for reading on Kobo aura HD, as it does a pages in chapter count, and they were fine.

[Gregg Bell]

Originally Posted by davidfor

The 260KB size refers to the internal files. Older versions of Adobe epub reader code couldn't handle these properly. So, a novel gets split into smaller internal files, usually one file per chapter. And long chapters need to be split at some other point.

For newer epub readers, this is not as important. They seem to handle them OK, but it can cause performance problems. As a test, I edited a book I with 30 chapters into a single file. This was over 1MB in size. On my Kobo Glo, it work fined. But, turning the page became slower as I went through it. Towards the end it was taking close to 30 seconds.

I don't have a Kindle but my understanding is that they don't have a problem like this.

Thanks davidfor. That's good to know. So the splitting is sort of what Sigil does then, right? (And this book (American Tragedy by Dreiser) did look huge. It look like three books in one.) Appreciate the info.

[Gregg Bell]

Originally Posted by cybmole

most novels from most sources come already split into chapters though, and it is rare for a single chapter to exceed 260k
i routinely run all new books added through a calibre epub to epub convert anyway which takes care of that and does other customization to my taste. calibre can add custom css to every book and it can run preset find/replaces searches also if needed.

I have recombined previously split mega chapters for reading on Kobo aura HD, as it does a pages in chapter count, and they were fine.

Thanks cybmole. I can experiment and check file sizes and so forth. And I look forward to using some of the deeper features of Calibre (for the customization).

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by davidfor

The 260KB size refers to the internal files. Older versions of Adobe epub reader code couldn't handle these properly. So, a novel gets split into smaller internal files, usually one file per chapter. And long chapters need to be split at some other point.

For newer epub readers, this is not as important. They seem to handle them OK, but it can cause performance problems. As a test, I edited a book I with 30 chapters into a single file. This was over 1MB in size. On my Kobo Glo, it work fined. But, turning the page became slower as I went through it. Towards the end it was taking close to 30 seconds.

I don't have a Kindle but my understanding is that they don't have a problem like this.

One reason Kindles don't have such a problem is that most KF8 eBooks are created from an ePub source. So since the ePub is made to the mobile specification, the KF8 eBook will be as well.

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

One reason Kindles don't have such a problem is that most KF8 eBooks are created from an ePub source. So since the ePub is made to the mobile specification, the KF8 eBook will be as well.

No, this won't do. That is not at all a reason that Kindles don't have this problem.

Kindles really don't have this problem at all, even for books that aren't split into nice sub-260KB chunks internally. The original Kindle didn't have this problem, and that used Mobi format files that were just one great big block of HTML 3.2ish text.

The Kindle rendering software has always been able to cope with rendering parts of large blocks of HTML, and that hasn't changed with the switch to AZW3 format.

Mind you, the same is now true, I think, of more recent versions of Adobe's RMSDK, so the 260JB limit only really affects older devices.