Why the "“", "â€", and "’"?

[slothrop]

Why do "“", "â€", and "’" appear in many of the Kindle books I send from Calibre?

In many books, all the open double quotes get replaced by “, close double quotes get replaced by â€, and the apostrophes by ’.

In the E-book reader built into Calibre, everything looks normal. But after I send it to the Kindle, this replacement happens.

Is this a Calibre issue? Or a Kindle issue? And more importantly, how can I fix this?

[isarl]

It looks like your files have been marked as having the wrong encoding. Either reencoding the files, or changing the declared charset, should have characters displaying properly again.

In particular, this error looks like what happens when software attempts to decode Unicode-encoded text under the assumption that it is CP1252 (or Latin1/ISO-8859-1, which modern browsers often treat as CP1252 regardless).

If your files have character sets declared which are not utf-8, try changing that and seeing if it helps.

[Doitsu]

Originally Posted by slothrop

And more importantly, how can I fix this?

Install the Modify Epub plugin select the book(s) and then select Modify ePub > Encode HTML in UTF8.

[isarl]

Originally Posted by Doitsu

Install the Modify Epub plugin select the book(s) and then select Modify ePub > Encode HTML in UTF8.

I may be wrong but these particular errors look to me like the file is already encoded as UTF-8. The problem is not how it is encoded, it is how it is being decoded.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by isarl

I may be wrong but these particular errors look to me like the file is already encoded as UTF-8. The problem is not how it is encoded, it is how it is being decoded.

Which Amazon does if the UTF8 statement is missing in an epub.
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"/>

If the charset is not defined Amazon assume it's CP1252. Some sort of throw-back to early days of Mobi on Kindle. Amazon bought Mobipocket, the biggest seller of ebooks on Windows CE, Symbian and Palm OS the year Sony brought out eink (2005) and first Kindle was 2007.

Historical stupidity.

Use Modify Epub tool or edit existing <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html> (or whatever) to <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"/> at the top of every HTML file.

[Doitsu]

Originally Posted by isarl

I may be wrong but these particular errors look to me like the file is already encoded as UTF-8. The problem is not how it is encoded, it is how it is being decoded.

The html files are most likely either missing encoding declarations and/or contain Mojibake.
If they're missing encoding declarations they aren't properly encoded and might be incorrectly decoded.
AFAIK, the Modify ePub plugin will add missing encoding declarations, but can't handle Mojibake.