weird thing in some bought kobo books

[franklekens]

I bought a few books that I then sideloaded onto my Kobo ereader.

Something has gone wrong with some of these, and it seems to have something to do with code tables.
E.g. there are random  signs popping up where there should just be a blank line.
Also, apostrophes are rendered as â. Very annoying.

Also, these  signs show up (for blank lines) in what looks like the improvised cover picture.
This cover picture shows up like this, with the  symbols, on the Kobo device *and* on the preview in the Calibre main window. But it does *not* show up like this when I open the file in Calibre. There, the cover looks normal, and apostrophes are also rendered correctly.

At first I thought this had something to do with the recent Calibre update with "improved" Kobo support. But one of the books I bought & sideloaded in the same batch does not display this problem, whereas the other three do. So I'm beginning to doubt that is the problem.

But what is, then?
I haven't changed anything in my configuration of Calibre (other than updating to 8.0.1) and/or the Kobo Utilities plugin.

[rashkae]

If you install the Modify Epub plugin to Calibre, you can try the Encode HTML in UTF-8 format and see if that fixes these for you.

[fogice]

Perhaps try a different font? Maybe the font on your Kobo doesn't have all the right symbols.

[franklekens]

Thank you. The first tip helped.
It's strange though. Four books by the same author, from the same publisher, all regular titles, and two of those were fine, while two of them displayed this problem, at least after importing them in Calibre (and de-DRMing them, which was the only way I could sideload them). And it's never happened before, even though I've bougth hundreds of books the same way.

But so far changing the encoding to utf-8 in Modify Epub does seem to help. So thanks for the tip.

[rashkae]

If it had been different books from different publishers, that would have been strange. That a single, probably independant, publisher was putting out faulty epubs with poor software if the kind of thing that can happen. In this case, I think the encoding was *not* defined in the html/xhtml files, and the reading software on the Kobo was just making a different assumption.

[DNSB]

For what it may be worth, an ePub MUST be encoded in UTF-8 or UTF-16 though I can count the number of UTF-16 encoded ePubs that I've seen over the last 15 years without needing to use more than both thumbs.

OTOH, I've seen ePubs encoded in whatever the local encoding used by the OS all too often. At least now, anyone who checks with epubcheck gets an error message (that covers most publishers and ebook creators/polishers).

[franklekens]

This is a major publisher and a Nobel prize level author. I really think there must be something in Calibre which causes this, because it's never happened before and only started when I upgraded to the version 8 with the supposedly better Kobo support. It's just happened again with a book (same author, but that's incidental).

I get the feeling it may have something to do with the cover or something. All three books this happened with, show up in Adobe Digital Editions without the cover image, just a generic title page. But I can't for the life of me think why that should make a difference.

[Quoth]

No, plenty of ebooks are badly formatted, even from big publishers. Sometimes especially if they use InDesign (which is for paper publishing / fixed layout and kludged for ebooks) or the person formatting is clueless, or the source document is styled badly but looks OK on paper, or the person formatting thinks because ebooks use HTML and CSS that it's like doing web pages (it's not, as only a subset works and some things behave differently).

[PeterT]

Originally Posted by franklekens

This is a major publisher and a Nobel prize level author.

Unfortunately the reputation of the author and/or publisher is irrelevant here.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by PeterT

Unfortunately the reputation of the author and/or publisher is irrelevant here.

Yes, and most authors still use computers like glass typewriters. Most publishers do paper first and ebooks are an afterthought.

Ability to successfully publish or ability to write great content is totally unrelated to the skills of producing ebooks or properly using styles in the wordprocessor.

Also "Nobel prize level author" actually doesn't mean much about the general entertainment value of the writing, or even the "quality". Same can be said of most book awards too. Some used to be be an indication a book was worth reading, less so now. There is a lot of literary snobbery.

[JSWolf]

The problem is the publishers do not view the eBooks in different programs and Readers. So they don't see these sorts of obvious issues.