Problem with my Forma

[Strether]

A book I'm reading has mentioned part of James Joyce's Ulysses frequently and, wanting to read that section, I loaded the complete James Joyce that I have in my library on the Forma. The Forma froze and after restarting, I removed the book via Calibre. The Forma has frozen a number of times so I assumed that it was just this device that was a problem. So I loaded the books to my H2O2, which has never frozen, but it too froze and the file had to be removed. No problem loading the file on my Kindle, but that wasn't where I wanted to read the book.

Is there something I should know about loading a large file on a Kobo device, or is it just this file? I wonder if someone else has successfully loaded these books on their Kobo device.

Jim

[PeterT]

What format is the book?

[Strether]

Originally Posted by PeterT

What format is the book?

Kobo epub, converted by Calibre just before installing it on the Forma.

Jim

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by Strether

Kobo epub, converted by Calibre just before installing it on the Forma.

There is a known problem large kepubs in firmware version 4.18.13737. It is probably related to the way the full book page count is now done. Kobo are looking at it.

Having said that, the word count I can find for Ulysses is 265k. I needed a book with two or three million words to trigger it. But, I think the way a book is structure is factor as well. Or, there could be errors in the book that trigger it as well. If it is the latter, then checking for errors in the calibre editor, or one of the error checking tools, might show what is the issue.

Other than that, you can try sideloading as an epub. Unless the problem is due to errors, it will probably work.

[Strether]

Originally Posted by davidfor

There is a known problem large kepubs in firmware version 4.18.13737. It is probably related to the way the full book page count is now done. Kobo are looking at it.

Having said that, the word count I can find for Ulysses is 265k. I needed a book with two or three million words to trigger it. But, I think the way a book is structure is factor as well. Or, there could be errors in the book that trigger it as well. If it is the latter, then checking for errors in the calibre editor, or one of the error checking tools, might show what is the issue.

Other than that, you can try sideloading as an epub. Unless the problem is due to errors, it will probably work.

Thanks, David. The file I downloaded and which froze both readers, was the complete works of Joyce, which is 5.08 MB in size. I’d guess it’s the size that’s bothering the Kobo. I’ve since downloaded just Ulysses from the Mobileread library, which solves this problem, but warns me that if I want to read something else by Joyce, I may have to do it on the Kindle

Jim

[MGlitch]

For what it’s worth David the Complete Wheel of Time and the collected Malazan ebook both from Kobo and comfortably over the 3 million word count (respectively 4,410,036 and 3,325,000 approximately) have triggered no issues on either my Forma or my original H2O.

Not sure if that’s helpful to finding the underlying issue but it’s two massive ebooks from Kobo which don’t cause problems.

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by MGlitch

For what it’s worth David the Complete Wheel of Time and the collected Malazan ebook both from Kobo and comfortably over the 3 million word count (respectively 4,410,036 and 3,325,000 approximately) have triggered no issues on either my Forma or my original H2O.

Not sure if that’s helpful to finding the underlying issue but it’s two massive ebooks from Kobo which don’t cause problems.

I also have the Complete Wheel of Time on my Libra, both in kepub and epub (I prefer to read the epub, but searching is much faster in the kepub, so I'm keeping that for when I want to look something up). The epub is almost 24 MB. No problems.

[Strether]

It must be the structure of the file. Tried installing an epub version and it also froze my H2O2. Didn't try the Forma, but wouldn't expect different behavior.

Jim

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by Strether

Thanks, David. The file I downloaded and which froze both readers, was the complete works of Joyce, which is 5.08 MB in size. I’d guess it’s the size that’s bothering the Kobo. I’ve since downloaded just Ulysses from the Mobileread library, which solves this problem, but warns me that if I want to read something else by Joyce, I may have to do it on the Kindle

That would almost definitely do it. This sort of books tend to have lots of words and complicated structures.

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by Strether

It must be the structure of the file. Tried installing an epub version and it also froze my H2O2. Didn't try the Forma, but wouldn't expect different behavior.

Did that happen when importing the book? Or opening it the first time? I'd expect the epub to trigger a problem for the former, and the kepub the latter. But, I'd be interested to see the book to see if I can work it out.

[Strether]

Originally Posted by davidfor

Did that happen when importing the book? Or opening it the first time? I'd expect the epub to trigger a problem for the former, and the kepub the latter. But, I'd be interested to see the book to see if I can work it out.

All the freezes occurred when trying to open the book(s). You got a blank page with only the progress bar at the bottom showing. You can download the file from the Mobilread ePub library. Collected works of James Joyce.

Jim

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by MGlitch

For what it’s worth David the Complete Wheel of Time and the collected Malazan ebook both from Kobo and comfortably over the 3 million word count (respectively 4,410,036 and 3,325,000 approximately) have triggered no issues on either my Forma or my original H2O.

Not sure if that’s helpful to finding the underlying issue but it’s two massive ebooks from Kobo which don’t cause problems.

From what I can see it is a combination of things. I have a 3.5million word book with about 700 chapters that opens fine as a kepub. But, I rebuilt it to only have a single internal file. That didn't open.

The original book this was reported for was something like "The Big Book of British Mysteries" (not the exact title, but that's the gist). It was about 6.5 million words, 500 books in it and came from Kobo. The ToC had the author, each book under this and then the chapters in the book. I don't know the exact physical structure, whether each ToC entry was a file, but, this broke things when opening the book.

It is probably some relationship between the number of ToC entries, the number of files and the sheer size. I suspect that having multiple ToC entries in a file will make it more likely to happen.

[Dr. Drib]

^ Mine is bigger than yours.

The one I own has over 560 titles. Here's the full title:


BRITISH MYSTERIES Boxed Set: 560+ Thriller Classics, Detective Stories & True Crime Stories


When downloaded from Kobo, I'm presented with a blank screen on my Aura One and then the Kobo does an automatic reboot. I deleted it and instead put on the one from calibre. The same thing happens.

When I put it on my Kindle Voyage, it works perfectly.

We're probably talking about the same book, but I couldn't resist my opening sentence.

[JSWolf]

The thing totry is to install the patch for 4.18 to give sickel a longer time before it gives up and reboots. The longest time is 30 seconds.

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh....php?p=3898967

If 30 seconds is not enough, I suggest PMing Semwize and asking i a longer timeout can be patched in.

[Uschiekid]

Originally Posted by Strether

All the freezes occurred when trying to open the book(s). You got a blank page with only the progress bar at the bottom showing.

Not related if this is long book related, but when I updated my glo to the current firmware (4.12 to 4.18), all my epubs behaved this way, also if I added new ones. I checked if the db was ok with kobo utilities plugin, and it said it was. So I just figured it was time to start over (did a factory reset, when a logout might easily have been enough), and now epubs open as they should. Just thought I would mention it since you had identical behaviour. But, as I said, mine weren't long books.