Problem with book purchased from Kobo being illegible in ADE (and Calibre)

[Rectangle]

See the attached image for how it looks in ADE. It's completely zoomed out and I can't zoom in. I've tried removing and readding, and nothing works. It's just shows up like this. It works fine in Kobo's own reader, Kobo's app and so forth, but I want to be able to download the books as well... Apparently there have been others having the same issue when googling, but has no one been able to resolve it? Is there anyone here that has any idea?

Importing it into Calibre doesn't solve the issue either. The image is still as small. I tried using a different software to read the epub and then the images were at least full size but instead heavily pixelated as the resolution is super low either way, so just finding a way to zoom in won't help. Worth mentioning is that the epub doesn't seem to be a proper epub, as the book just contains scanned images.

The book is 時代華語3課本.

[Sirtel]

If the epub is just scanned images, there's nothing to be done with it. Your best bet is to get the kepub version either from your Kobo device or the Kobo desktop app, and use the obok plugin (bundled with deDRM) to remove the DRM.

[Rectangle]

Originally Posted by Sirtel

If the epub is just scanned images, there's nothing to be done with it. Your best bet is to get the kepub version either from your Kobo device or the Kobo desktop app, and use the obok plugin (bundled with deDRM) to remove the DRM.

This was such a good alternative solution. Thank you! I did all this and could read it fine in KOReader in the end. Anyway, in the end I think the issue might've been all ADE, Calibres e-book reader software as well as Okular which I tried. The images are originally zoomed out, and in Calibre I have to press the image to get it to show up in full-size which I didn't realize at first. I tried this with both the Kepub version and the ADE version and they looked the same now. In Okular they were either way just really pixelated (which was the reason why I thought they were low resolution to begin with). And in ADE it just didn't work at all because you can't zoom into the images, but probably would've worked on Kobos own firmware.

So in summary, I think the ADE+Calibre solution would've worked fine in KOReader as well if I had bothered to verify and/or known about having to press the image in Calibres own reader to have it show up.

[JSWolf]

The problem is that the images are too low a resolution.

[DNSB]

I took a quick look at a preview of the book. It does not appear to be DRMmed. What it is is a series of images (1500x2053 pixels) with each image comprising a page. There is also what appears to be links to MP3 audio files with a player but the audio files are not included but the QR code on the page does open the audio on my computer. The probable issue with ADE is that the original file is a fixed layout file (pre-paginated) and ADE does not deal well with them. OTOH, it is not a real fixed layout ePub3 since it is nothing but a series of images but if you use landscape on a Kobo ereader, you will get the right and left page spreads though likely only useful on an Elipsa sized screen.

[Rectangle]

Originally Posted by DNSB

I took a quick look at a preview of the book. It does not appear to be DRMmed. What it is is a series of images (1500x2053 pixels) with each image comprising a page. There is also what appears to be links to MP3 audio files with a player but the audio files are not included but the QR code on the page does open the audio on my computer. The probable issue with ADE is that the original file is a fixed layout file (pre-paginated) and ADE does not deal well with them. OTOH, it is not a real fixed layout ePub3 since it is nothing but a series of images but if you use landscape on a Kobo ereader, you will get the right and left page spreads though likely only useful on an Elipsa sized screen.

Thanks for the help and the technical explanation. Yeah, not an optimal ebook for sure but sometimes one has no choice! At least it works ok now on my reader.