The Kobo DRM-free epub fiasco

[jandrew]

Originally Posted by shalym

maybe you could discuss your experience with zooming pictures in epubs as opposed to kepubs. Are you able to do so? I'm interested to hear your experience.

If you want, just copy "book.epub" to your kobo ereader as "book.kepub.epub" and you'll have a plain epub that will be opened with the ACCESS renderer and will have zoomable images.

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by jackie_w

It sounds to me like you were able to put it in calibre which is exactly where you wanted it. What's the problem?

The problem is that they had to pry it out of Kobo's desktop software by manually rooting through directories that are often hidden by the OS (or with a DRM removal tool) just to get a proprietary mess of a file (that should have been a regular-old, directly- and easily-downloadable, DRM-Free epub) into calibre in the first place. That's the problem.

[PeterT]

The Kobo ePub renderer has never had the ability to zoom pictures. Frankly I for one don't see it as a big deal.

As others besides me have said in the past, the majority of images in an ePub have been compressed and do not have a great deal of detail that would be seen any clearer when zoomed in.

Of course, Cookbooks tend to have gigantic colour pictures of finished goods; how they expect those to show well on a grey scale device I don't know.

[BearMountainBooks]

Originally Posted by PeterT

The Kobo ePub renderer has never had the ability to zoom pictures. Frankly I for one don't see it as a big deal.

As others besides me have said in the past, the majority of images in an ePub have been compressed and do not have a great deal of detail that would be seen any clearer when zoomed in.

Of course, Cookbooks tend to have gigantic colour pictures of finished goods; how they expect those to show well on a grey scale device I don't know.

Good food ALWAYS looks good to me...in any color. Or black and white. And besides, chocolate always shows up well in black and white!!!!

[jackie_w]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

The problem is that they had to pry it out of Kobo's desktop software by manually rooting through directories that are often hidden by the OS (or with a DRM removal tool) just to get a proprietary mess of a file (that should have been a regular-old, directly- and easily-downloadable, DRM-Free epub) into calibre in the first place. That's the problem.

But the Obok plugin for calibre isn't just a DRM removal tool, is it? For DRM-free books it serves as the convenient means to avoid 'prying it out of Kobo's desktop software by manually rooting through directories...', with the added benefit that any internal metadata is correctly transferred to calibre (at least it was for this particular book).

My whole process was:

1. Open Kobo Desktop, find the book in the store, press DOWNLOAD button. Close Kobo Desktop.
2. Open calibre, click Obok, find book in GUI DRM-free list (with sensible names), press OK. It's now in calibre as an epub with a sensible name and some metadata.
3. (purely optional for this particular book) Tidy up the internal Kobo-fication with Modify Epub.
4. Do whatever else is normally done with any other new epub in calibre (e.g. error-checking).
5. Use calibre/CalibreCompanion to send to eink/Android device. Open book. Read.

... so if the above is considered 'onerous' then I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree about what constitutes a PITA.

BTW, as an epub-only reader, my process when getting a new book (with/without DRM) from Amazon is no easier or faster.

[DiapDealer]

i don't find your process onerous or a PITA -- for a book with drm. For a drm-free epub, I find it ridiculous.

As far as Amazon's process being similar ... who cares? Amazon doesn't sell ebooks in an open format (drm-free or otherwise). Everything there is proprietary. Epub is an open format, and anyone who sells drm-free epubs, shouldn't require the use of proprietary software to retrieve said drm-free epubs. They're zipped up html for gods sake.

[Byrdie]

I did not know obok could find my non-DRM books too. Because it sure wasn't doing that earlier and I was running the latest version of the plugin. But maybe it got borked after updating Calibre last time, anyway I just reinstalled it and now it sees everything just like you said. No digging involved. :-)

[doubleshuffle]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

i don't find your process onerous or a PITA -- for a book with drm. For a drm-free epub, I find it ridiculous.

As far as Amazon's process being similar ... who cares? Amazon doesn't sell ebooks in an open format (drm-free or otherwise). Everything there is proprietary. Epub is an open format, and anyone who sells drm-free epubs, shouldn't require the use of proprietary software to retrieve said drm-free epubs. They're zipped up html for gods sake.

Wot he said.

[joblack]

Originally Posted by PeterT

The Kobo ePub renderer has never had the ability to zoom pictures. Frankly I for one don't see it as a big deal.

As others besides me have said in the past, the majority of images in an ePub have been compressed and do not have a great deal of detail that would be seen any clearer when zoomed in.

That's just not true. Almost every O'Reilly e-book has the ability to zoom into the pictures and the pictures have a higher resolution Especially for 6.x inch e-book reader it's paramount to be able to zoom into pictures and other graphics. I know nobody who isn't using this feature on other e-book readers.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by shalym

Peter, instead of accusing the person of making assumptions or implying that they're lying, maybe you could discuss your experience with zooming pictures in epubs as opposed to kepubs. Are you able to do so? I'm interested to hear your experience.

Shari

Why is it when we disagree with someone, the "lying" bit comes into play? Just because someone says someone else is wrong, does not mean anyone is lying. So if I saw you are wrong, that does not mean you are lying. That just means you've made a mistake.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Marrella

Now, this is really weird. It just downloaded fine to my hard drive like all the other Tor books I have purchased from Kobo. Maybe it's a browser issue? Just an idea, though not very likely. I am using Safari on a Mac.

Can you please go back to the link for that eBook and copy the link and pate it here? Thanks.

[dgatwood]

Originally Posted by fjtorres

How are the Kobo readers with sideloaded epub3? New ones, old ones...?

I'd imagine it depends on the EPUB.

All my books are EPUB 3, but they provide a full complement of EPUB 2 metadata, with the exception of the HTML TOC being in a different format that is more appropriate for EPUB 3, but should still work fine on anything that can render HTML. So barring the reader simply being stupid and having an assert(epub.version = 2) or some other such nonsense, it ought to work.

However, it is also possible to build EPUB 3 books without any of the EPUB 2 compatibility features (e.g toc.ncx). Those books could range from somewhat broken to completely unusable on an EPUB 2 reader, depending on the reader.

Either way, though, this is going to affect three books that I'm about to ship, so I'm now having a serious debate about whether to offer my books through Kobo, and if so, whether to ship them a slightly different EPUB file built with my toolchain set to EPUB 2 mode just so they won't do this. I'm going to get in touch with Kobo and I'll let you know if I hear anything back from them.

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by Byrdie

I did not know obok could find my non-DRM books too. Because it sure wasn't doing that earlier and I was running the latest version of the plugin. But maybe it got borked after updating Calibre last time, anyway I just reinstalled it and now it sees everything just like you said. No digging involved. :-)

Actually, someone updated it a little while ago. I've have a version that does it, but it doesn't seem to have been released. I only realised this last night when I wanted to look at the kepub version of a book.

[darryl]

Originally Posted by davidfor

Actually, someone updated it a little while ago. I've have a version that does it, but it doesn't seem to have been released. I only realised this last night when I wanted to look at the kepub version of a book.

It must have been released because I have the same version which I would have downloaded through a publicly available link.

[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by PeterT

BTW, as an epub-only reader, my process when getting a new book (with/without DRM) from Amazon is no easier or faster.

You can set your My Kindle Content folder as your auto-add folder, and the DeDRM plugin will automatically handle the books as they come in.
Also, make sure to set Kindle for PC/Mac as your default device at http://amzn.com/myk

That is what many people do with Amazon books, and it also means they need only open Kindle for PC/Mac to auto-download new books, then open calibre and have all new books auto-added.

You literally do not have to do anything other than start the respective programs from the start menu.

You can do almost the same thing with ADE, except you cannot have books queued for download.

You most certainly cannot do this with Kobo desktop.