Aura HD Possible 2.8.1 bug

[trekk]

Originally Posted by jackastor

For me the bug has happened but has not reoccurred on the same book yet.


regards

jack

For me the bug has reoccured on the same books, but not every time I opened them. All kobofied ePubs. To escape from the stuck loading screen, I tap the header and next the middle of the screen. Everything is fine then.

[speakingtohe]

Originally Posted by Ken Maltby

I download an epub file and the Kobo rejects it but it reads fine on other ereading devices and on most software reading programs. You seem to be saying that if it is not fully in compliance with your testing programs and perhaps the epub standard, then the file is garbage. How do you then explain that other readers have no problem allowing the reading of this "Garbage File", and providing the story for my entertainment, while the Kobo can't. Can you explain how this is of benefit to someone who just wants to read the story?

Luck;
Ken

I'm with you on this one. If my Sony can display it and my mother's kindle can display a converted version and 10 or so free or commercial apps can display the book, all in a similar and readable manner, I scratch my head and wonder why my Kobo's can't. Approximately 30 % of older books I have are in this category.

I can understand why people who have spent a lot of time and effort learning epubcheck etc., so they can fix the books to Kobo's limited interpretation abilities feeling that this is the thing to do. Possibly we would feel that way too if Kobo was our first ereader experience.

Generally I follow Kovid Goyal's advice and convert to mobi and back to epub, which fixes most problems without noticeably affecting the formatting etc. Not purist perhaps, but quick and easy Still I mumble under my breath when doing it.

Helen

[JLuecking]

I had the same problem under the same conditions (sideloaded calibre kobofied epub). Pressing long time on the white screen made the dictionary appear. Pressing then on the imaginary spot in the right bottom corner, where you normally close the dictionary options menu (x), made the text appear.

I did a factory reset and I went back to the previous firmware. I blame the bug onto the calibre plugin.

Joachim

[speakingtohe]

Originally Posted by JLuecking

I had the same problem under the same conditions (sideloaded calibre kobofied epub). Pressing long time on the white screen made the dictionary appear. Pressing then on the imaginary spot in the right bottom corner, where you normally close the dictionary options menu (x), made the text appear.

I did a factory reset and I went back to the previous firmware. I blame the bug onto the calibre plugin.

Joachim

If so then removing the book and reloading it in another way should have fixed it.

Helen

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by speakingtohe

If so then removing the book and reloading it in another way should have fixed it.

I tried with a batch of kobofied ebooks and had issues with several. Those ebooks worked happily as .epubs and as .kepub.epubs when I only renamed them without using the plugin. It does appear to be an issue with the way the ACCESS renderer and/or Kobo's wrapper code handles the plugin kobofied epubs.

Regards,
David

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by speakingtohe

I can understand why people who have spent a lot of time and effort learning epubcheck etc., so they can fix the books to Kobo's limited interpretation abilities feeling that this is the thing to do. Possibly we would feel that way too if Kobo was our first ereader experience.

Before I purchased my first Kobo ereader, I used multiple tools to clean up the ebooks I was reading. For the most part, to give them a consistent appearance with the margins, line spacing, chapter titles, tables of contents, cover images, paragraph indents, etc. set the way I wanted them. Transferring those cleaned up ebooks to a Kobo reader has resulted in me seeing very few problems with reading ebooks other than minor issues such as the original Kobo ereader firmware not liking apostrophes in file names. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthurs Court was acceptable. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court triggered a DRM error.

As for spending a lot of time and effort learning these tools? Sigil has a learning curve mostly related to learning the ins and outs of it's regular expression parser which makes cleaning up a crap ebook an expletive deleted lot faster. FlightCrew and epubcheck with GUI front ends have (in my opinion) virtually no learning curve. Batch checking does require a bit of experience with batch/script files but for single files, it doesn't get much simpler than dropping a file on the application and looking at the error messages (if any).

Other people's opinions may vary -- we each have our own skill sets and experience.

Regards,
David

[Ken Maltby]

So somewhere up north, something (the opposite of a Gnome) is reading this thread, in his little log cabin software programing Gulag, and chuckling "You didn't think you could get away with using OUR reading program on your dirty little FAKE Kepubs, did you!!" "Get it through your heads, it's Kobo purchased Ebooks or Bugger off."

Luck;
Ken

[PeterT]

Have you considered it's because we don't fully understand what IS needed to Kobify an eBook?

[jgoguen]

Originally Posted by JLuecking

I did a factory reset and I went back to the previous firmware. I blame the bug onto the calibre plugin.

Possible, but considering that it also happens with some Kobo-provided KePub files I doubt it. Either that or books with my plugin are broken the same way as some Kobo-supplied KePub files.

Originally Posted by Ken Maltby

So somewhere up north, something (the opposite of a Gnome) is reading this thread, in his little log cabin software programing Gulag, and chuckling "You didn't think you could get away with using OUR reading program on your dirty little FAKE Kepubs, did you!!" "Get it through your heads, it's Kobo purchased Ebooks or Bugger off."

Did you consider that Kobo may not be telling us what's needed to make a fully-compliant KePub? And why would they, when rolling our own KePub files removes incentive to purchase Kobo books? The fact that people on the Kobo development and product teams know that this plugin is working as well as it is and the worst they've done is say "we can't support you if you use this" says a lot to me. Unlike what I would have expected from some other companies, Kobo hasn't even tried to do anything to discourage me from trying to figure out the KePub details and for that I think they deserve a lot more respect than what your post implies. Yes, Kobo needs a lot of work on their development processes. With that said, don't assume that code issues implies lazy/bad/malicious/whatever developers, or that process issues are the fault of the developers' managers.

Besides, Kobo intends for user-supplied books to use the Adobe renderer; the KePub plugin causes books that were never intended to be parsed to be uploaded using a program that was never intended to upload KePub files and accessed using a renderer that end users are never intended to access in this manner.

[PeterT]

@jgoguen: Well Said! I'd throw some more karma your way but I need to spread it around a bit more first

[Ken Maltby]

The incentive to buy a particular product should always be that they made it better than the other guys. "Better" being a relative term and a subjective ranking as well. Kobo seems to be schizophrenic in this regard, on the one hand they advertise "Read On Almost Any Device!" "Read Freely" on the other they make their own proprietary version of the most open format around. If they are deliberately making their "special" renderer a brick in their version of the garden wall, and upgrades making it more so, then how does that bode for the future?

Luck;
Ken

[HansTWN]

Originally Posted by Ken Maltby

The incentive to buy a particular product should always be that they made it better than the other guys. "Better" being a relative term and a subjective ranking as well. Kobo seems to be schizophrenic in this regard, on the one hand they advertise "Read On Almost Any Device!" "Read Freely" on the other they make their own proprietary version of the most open format around. If they are deliberately making their "special" renderer a brick in their version of the garden wall, and upgrades making it more so, then how does that bode for the future?

Luck;
Ken

Unless they eliminate the Adobe renderer I really don't see what the fuss is about. "Kobefying" books is a hack (and I mean that in a positive way, I am using it myself). They want to offer something special for those who buy their books rather than just buy their readers, what is wrong with that? They don't make money on the hardware.

[davidfor]

@jgoguen: I'm with you on this. While they don't officially support my efforts with calibre and the Kobo devices, they have never blocked me. They have answered my occasional questions and have supplied some info unprompted. They have also fixed bugs I have reported purely because of what I saw while looking at the database while working with calibre. And I can think of at least one bug that they have fixed that only happened with sideloaded kepubs.

[speakingtohe]

Originally Posted by DNSB

Before I purchased my first Kobo ereader, I used multiple tools to clean up the ebooks I was reading. For the most part, to give them a consistent appearance with the margins, line spacing, chapter titles, tables of contents, cover images, paragraph indents, etc. set the way I wanted them. Transferring those cleaned up ebooks to a Kobo reader has resulted in me seeing very few problems with reading ebooks other than minor issues such as the original Kobo ereader firmware not liking apostrophes in file names. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthurs Court was acceptable. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court triggered a DRM error.

As for spending a lot of time and effort learning these tools? Sigil has a learning curve mostly related to learning the ins and outs of it's regular expression parser which makes cleaning up a crap ebook an expletive deleted lot faster. FlightCrew and epubcheck with GUI front ends have (in my opinion) virtually no learning curve. Batch checking does require a bit of experience with batch/script files but for single files, it doesn't get much simpler than dropping a file on the application and looking at the error messages (if any).

Other people's opinions may vary -- we each have our own skill sets and experience.

Regards,
David

I think making them nice and shiny is a good thing if it enhances your enjoyment of the book.

For me it doesn't so much. I will remove page numbers and format the way I like a book to appear and fix up obvious ugly things, but I don't care about the underlying CSS unless it gives me huge line spacing etc.

Many old PD books I have do not go well on the Kobo. Probably there was no epubcheck when someone kindly scanned them in, probably there was no epub even. And I have even encountered newer books that have problems uniquely on the Kobo readers. Most of these can be fixed in under a minute so this is what I do

I did 'fix' a few books with Sigil, but found myself reading while fixing and couldn't seem to stop and I don't like that. It seems to spoil the book for me.
I rarely reread and it felt like I had read the book already even if only 25% or so.

So now I fix what I can do fairly quickly (under an hour perhaps, but preferably under 5 minutes) and if it is not that simple I put it aside until I have no grass to watch growing.

I like the look of nice shiny books, with things like caps drop etc. but rarely notice such things while reading after the first page or so.

In fact I am soooo lazy I will look up the odd missing word or paragraph in calibre if the Kobo refuses to show it to me even when I change the font but leave the book as is.

Still if you reread a lot or find the odd extra line break etc., disturbs your enjoyment it is a good thing for you to do.


Helen

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by speakingtohe

I think making them nice and shiny is a good thing if it enhances your enjoyment of the book.

Sadly, not so much nice and shiny. The best way to describe my preferred format is vanilla and dull. Less to get in the way of my enjoying the book.

Originally Posted by speakingtohe

For me it doesn't so much. I will remove page numbers and format the way I like a book to appear and fix up obvious ugly things, but I don't care about the underlying CSS unless it gives me huge line spacing etc.

Whereas I have a boilerplate CSS that gives me what I want. And enough saved regex's for Sigil to make changing most ebooks over a 10-15 minute chore.

Originally Posted by speakingtohe

Many old PD books I have do not go well on the Kobo. Probably there was no epubcheck when someone kindly scanned them in, probably there was no epub even. And I have even encountered newer books that have problems uniquely on the Kobo readers. Most of these can be fixed in under a minute so this is what I do

I did 'fix' a few books with Sigil, but found myself reading while fixing and couldn't seem to stop and I don't like that. It seems to spoil the book for me.
I rarely reread and it felt like I had read the book already even if only 25% or so.

So now I fix what I can do fairly quickly (under an hour perhaps, but preferably under 5 minutes) and if it is not that simple I put it aside until I have no grass to watch growing.

Generally, I allow 15 minutes maximum to clean up a book. As for reading while fixing, I spent several years doing proof-reading as a part time job. About as boring a job as you can find but I learned how to scan for errors and not actually read the text.

I do re-read books after a period of time. Some of them I enjoy more the second or third time around. Others are definitely in the "cold pancakes and no honey" category.

Originally Posted by speakingtohe

I like the look of nice shiny books, with things like caps drop etc. but rarely notice such things while reading after the first page or so.

I've added fleurons, vignettes, drop caps and other fancy formatting to ebooks when requested to do so. For my own reading, forget it. For me, if the words aren't worth reading, making the page pretty is like slapping a coat of paint on a rustbucket in the hopes it'll look new.

Originally Posted by speakingtohe

In fact I am soooo lazy I will look up the odd missing word or paragraph in calibre if the Kobo refuses to show it to me even when I change the font but leave the book as is.

Still if you reread a lot or find the odd extra line break etc., disturbs your enjoyment it is a good thing for you to do.

Part of my current employment is spending time being there just in case in the middle of the night. Editing ebooks is one of the things I do to keep myself awake. Beats endless games of solitaire.

Regards,
David