Keep ya eyes open... 3.1.0

[church mouse]

Originally Posted by jackastor

Curious, what format is your book? Epub? Native kepub? Or epub to kepub conversion?

Jack

Epubs converted to kepubs and loaded through Calibre usually, though I did experience the issue with a Kobo kepub.

[arspr]

Originally Posted by RobertJSawyer

Here are links to two more ebooks I've purchased from the Kobo Canadian bookstore. Both have atrocious formatting under firmware 3.1.0 compared to earlier releases; again, the problem is the complete elimination of vertical spacing between elements (I imagine the problems also show up in the free previews of these books):

http://store.kobobooks.com/en-CA/ebo...off-the-bridge

http://store.kobobooks.com/en-CA/ebo...planet-blues-1

The first one, which uses a lot of complex formatting, shows the problem on almost every page.

The second one is particularly irritating for me, as it's one of my own novels. Look at the Copyright Page, the Dedication, and the beginning of any chapter.

I've provided links to works from a wide variety of commercial publishers (Workman Publishing and Penguin Canada in the two examples above); this is not a case of the firmware tripping up on the quirky formatting done by a single oddball publisher; this is an across-the-board problem.

I hope progress is being made on this.

Has anybody checked what has been broken in the CSS rendering? I mean can anybody provide a FREE (without DRM) test book (or sample) which shows the trouble?

I would like to take a look at it. Maybe it's another issue to add to orphans, widows, page-break- and @page.

[jackastor]

Originally Posted by church mouse

Epubs converted to kepubs and loaded through Calibre usually, though I did experience the issue with a Kobo kepub.

Thanks, its good to know that a regular Kobo File was affected which would indicate its not an issue with the calibre drivers or extended drivers!

regards

Jack

[susaz]

Originally Posted by RobertJSawyer

I'm having the same problem. Personally, I've only seen it with sideloaded ebooks being loaded as .kepub.epub -- and those go to my (Sandisk) Micro SD card. Reloading the book as a plain .epub has caused the problem to go away for me (because, I presume, it bypasses the ACCESS rendering engine).

So that you know, your book is not available internationally so I couldn't see the formatting... Grrr, and I bought a Kobo just for that!!!

That happens to me with Neal Stephenson's Anatema. The formatting at the front of each chapter drives the Kobo absolutely nuts!

If they don't listen to you, and format your own books correctly, what's left for the rest of us!!!

[susaz]

Originally Posted by church mouse

Epubs converted to kepubs and loaded through Calibre usually, though I did experience the issue with a Kobo kepub.

I have all of mine formatted as Kepubs. Next time it freezes I'll delete the Kepub and load it as an epub to see if it works.

[RobertJSawyer]

Suaz, my book IS available internationally, just not that particular edition. I have separate US, UK, and Canadian publishers, each with their own editions. The US publisher -- Ace Science Fiction -- has "open market" English rights (the rights to sell English editions in countries where English is not the principal language); their edition should be available in your local Kobo ebookstore, if you search on my name as author.

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by RobertJSawyer

I'm having the same problem. Personally, I've only seen it with sideloaded ebooks being loaded as .kepub.epub -- and those go to my (Sandisk) Micro SD card. Reloading the book as a plain .epub has caused the problem to go away for me (because, I presume, it bypasses the ACCESS rendering engine).

When this first came up in 2.8.1, it seemed to only happen with kepubs that had embedded fonts and the font setting was "Default Font". I am still seeing most of this behaviour with 3.1.0. The difference is that the page does get displayed, but it takes a long time. This also happens when using the TOC to choose a new chapter.

[speedtouch]

Originally Posted by church mouse

Epubs converted to kepubs and loaded through Calibre usually, though I did experience the issue with a Kobo kepub.

Being new to the Kobo universe, why would I want to convert my epubs to kepubs?

[Anak]

Originally Posted by RobertJSawyer

Here are links to two more ebooks I've purchased from the Kobo Canadian bookstore. Both have atrocious formatting under firmware 3.1.0 compared to earlier releases; again, the problem is the complete elimination of vertical spacing between elements (I imagine the problems also show up in the free previews of these books):

http://store.kobobooks.com/en-CA/ebo...off-the-bridge

http://store.kobobooks.com/en-CA/ebo...planet-blues-1

The first one, which uses a lot of complex formatting, shows the problem on almost every page.

The second one is particularly irritating for me, as it's one of my own novels. Look at the Copyright Page, the Dedication, and the beginning of any chapter.

I've provided links to works from a wide variety of commercial publishers (Workman Publishing and Penguin Canada in the two examples above); this is not a case of the firmware tripping up on the quirky formatting done by a single oddball publisher; this is an across-the-board problem.

I hope progress is being made on this.

Maybe you should ask and inform your book publisher about it. Maybe there is a legal way to prohibit Kobo from issuing such lousy book conversions.
Or only after final approval by the publisher or author of the book.


The conversion is only done to enable "special" Kobo e-reader features which won't work with plain epubs (on Kobo devices).
Those features are not that special as almost every other e-reader brand offers similar features to install customized fonts, adjust page margins, text alignment and line spacing, show/hide header (booktitle) and footer (pageometer) etc. The main difference is that other e-reader manufacturers have managed to make their own unique features work with regular epubs. The reason is probably because they only sell the hardware and not the software.
I do hope that Kobo does make progress to solve these issues, but personally I don't believe they will.
The chosen implemention is just wrong. As features are hardware/user agent dependent the implemention of any feature should be done by the hardware and firmware on the fly. This is how other manufacturers have implemented it and features don't depend on/don't need additional code added to (third party) software (book).
This is certainly not flawless but easier to control and fix.
There is almost no legacy. Only changes to the firmware are necessary to fix, improve or add additional features.
If Kobo decides to make any changes to their added code it will probably work with newer books but not necessery with older, previously released books. To make those books also work they probably need a new conversion. At minimum, the new code needs to be parsed in to replace the exisiting "Kobo code".

[church mouse]

Originally Posted by speedtouch

Being new to the Kobo universe, why would I want to convert my epubs to kepubs?

I began converting my epubs to kepubs through the Calibre plug-in because I liked having the book title at the top of each page, and page numbers at the bottom being page in the chapter.

[Joques]

Originally Posted by church mouse

I began converting my epubs to kepubs through the Calibre plug-in because I liked having the book title at the top of each page, and page numbers at the bottom being page in the chapter.

Seconded. Also it is my experience with Epubs that an embedded font will override my font selection, so that I can't read in the font that I want to. With Kepubs, I have never had this problem.

[GeoffR]

Originally Posted by Joques

Seconded. Also it is my experience with Epubs that an embedded font will override my font selection, so that I can't read in the font that I want to. With Kepubs, I have never had this problem.

There is a way to fix that by editing the epub's CSS. Basically you just need to remove the font-family line from the paragraph level and add it to the body level. Then the embedded font will only be used in paragraphs if you have the "Document Default" font set, and will be overridden if you choose any other font.

The same basic idea applies to justification and line spacing, if they are set at the paragraph level then they can't be adjusted on the device, but if set at the body level then they can be overridden by the device settings.

I prefer the epub reader, provided the epub is well constructed, but most epubs are poorly constructed and it takes time to fix all the publisher's mistakes. If I buy the book from Kobo I'll usually start reading the kepub version and only sideload the epub if there are mistakes that need fixing.

[Joques]

Geoff, I prefer Kepubs either way, and there is no way I'll go through 650 books and manually edit the CSS

[Filmbrain]

Originally Posted by Josieb1

I tried to sort Pocket today by Oldest and it no longer works properly on 3.1 but it did on 2.10. I have a KOBO Aura

Hey Josie -- I'm seeing the same thing on my Aura HD. Sorting by oldest no longer works. New articles appear somewhere on the first page or 2, rather than at the end.

Most odd...

[rashkae]

Just idle speculation on my part. There was an issue a long time ago where Kepubs were being loaded to the Adobe content server instead of epubs. They were encryted with Adobe DRM, but once decrypted, the files were formatted as Kepubs (with the javascript Kobo uses to define several css styling elements, and the infamous missig space after italics throughout the text.). It was my understanding, possibly wrong, that files delivered from the Adobe content server are provided by the publisher (or more specifically, their chosen e-distributor.. Ingram?) This makes me wonder if the Kepubs themsevles are actually created by the publisher/distributor as well, and no in house by Kobo.