Aura HD Kobo Reader and Bookstore for non-drm or drm-removable books?

[Dr. Drib]

Rather than posting where DRM-free material can be obtained, please post to this thread in the FREEBIES FORUM:

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...d.php?t=257084

Thank you.


Don
(Moderator)

[BryanK]

Originally Posted by davidfor

Well, I'm the one who made the claim, but yes. The other David's post went into details, but a lot of what we are talking about is probably not in the renderer but in the interface application around it. As an example, the chapter graph in the in-book stats for kepubs is a graph of the word count of each chapter. The word count is calculated for a kepub the first time it is opened and the graph based on that. I think it would be possible to do this for epubs as well. The current position in the epub is available to the application and I'd be surprised if the chapter word count or an equivalent number wasn't as well. And of course, the 1.9.x firmware had an indicator showing the position and chapter positions along the bottom menu when it was displayed. That shows something similar is possible.

I had always assumed that the chapter position was calculated off of the current 1024-character page.

And there is no real reason Kobo can't open DRM-free epubs with the kepub reader. The reading position system used is the problem. I would be surprised if the ACCESS engine doesn't also support either the RMSDK or the epub3 reading position. My assumption has been that Kobo has turned this off and added their own position system as part of the justification of their own format. Or, they implemented it a long time ago and have decided to keep it.

I haven't looked closely at the files of a DRM-stripped kepub. So there are no modifications to the kepub itself to support things like annotations or dictionary lookup? If not (which seems to be the case since you can just rename an epub), then as you say, the only reason DRM-free epubs couldn't be rendered by either engine is the extra step in identifying which epub file has DRM and which doesn't.

[eschwartz]

Not "no modifications", in fact KEPUBs get filled with span tags that don't change anything but provide locator references for the ACCESS engine's annotations support.

I do note that many many other apps/devices have solved the annotations problem without requiring modification of the ebook files, but to each their own...

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by BryanK

I had always assumed that the chapter position was calculated off of the current 1024-character page.

I haven't looked closely at the files of a DRM-stripped kepub. So there are no modifications to the kepub itself to support things like annotations or dictionary lookup? If not (which seems to be the case since you can just rename an epub), then as you say, the only reason DRM-free epubs couldn't be rendered by either engine is the extra step in identifying which epub file has DRM and which doesn't.

The position in an epub is recorded as a walk of the tags in the current internal file plus a character offset within the current tag. A Kepub is different in that each sentence is wrapped in a span with a unique id. The position is the id of the span plus a character offset within the span.

The chapter graphs for kepubs are appear to be based on the word or character count in the chapter. At least, I can see a difference in height of a three page chapters with a couple of lines on the last page against a full third page. I assume the height of the current position is based on the same thing, but it might be just divide by the number of pages. The proof of which way would be to create a chapter with several pages of single word per line and one page packed full of text.

A kepub is a valid epub. The spans added for navigation/bookmarking are annoying but work. I keep hoping Kobo will drop them or at least use another method if they don't exist in the book. The do have other requirements, but they are tightening of the epub specs rather than things that break them as an epub. And they use a different DRM which means a different DRM decoder.

The only other wrinkle to this is that a kepub can be based on an epub3. The ACCESS (or whatever it is called now) renderer is an epub3 renderer. It seems to do a good job with epub3 features that are practical for an e-ink ereader. If epub3 kepub doesn't use any specific epub3 features, the version of RMSDK used by Kobo will probably will probably open it OK. But, if epub3 features are used, there will be problems.