Converting an images-only Kindle Book?

[Valour549]

Hi everyone I'm new to Calibre. After some experimenting and reading I've managed to convert most of my Kindle e-books to PDF, but there is one book that I've had trouble with.

Harry Potter A History of Magic, which I've uploaded Link to copyrighted material deleted.

Basically this book has text, but it's designed in a way that the text should be treated as part of a picture, and thus every page in this book is an image. I tried viewing it in Calibre viewer but also no luck because it's trying to analyze the words as actual text. An example

So my question is how should I setup the conversion so that Calibre treats every one of the 393 pages as an image per page, and outputs a 393-page PDF? Thanks for your help.

[mbovenka]

Originally Posted by Valour549

So my question is how should I setup the conversion so that Calibre treats every one of the 393 pages as an image per page, and outputs a 393-page PDF? Thanks for your help.

That's an AZW4 'Print Replica' file. It's in effect a PDF with an Amazon wrapper around it.

The KindleUnpack plugin can liberate its inner PDF without any conversion neccessary.

[Valour549]

Originally Posted by mbovenka

That's an AZW4 'Print Replica' file. It's in effect a PDF with an Amazon wrapper around it.

The KindleUnpack plugin can liberate its inner PDF without any conversion neccessary.

I installed it and selected the Unpack AZW3 option, but while it gave a lot of bits and pieces of files, there no was PDF. How do I make it give me a PDF?

[Valour549]

Originally Posted by mbovenka

That's an AZW4 'Print Replica' file. It's in effect a PDF with an Amazon wrapper around it.

The KindleUnpack plugin can liberate its inner PDF without any conversion neccessary.

Are you sure it's an AZW4 file? It can be downloaded from my OP.

Because by the looks of it, it's an AZW3 file.. just one that seems hard to deal with, because it has text overlaid on images on every page.

[mbovenka]

Hmmm...if it's really an AZW3, then KindleUnpack should be able to extract the EPUB, but that won't help you much. Although you might want to try it, you never know.

I wasn't able to open the book (it still has DRM), so I made an assumption going from your description. I can't help you any further, sorry.

[issybird]

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[DNSB]

I own the epub version of that ebook and it is a Epub3 fixed layout so I suspect the azw3 is Amazon's dumbed down and crapped up fixed layout format. The joy of fixed layout is that every element is individually positioned on the page. Each page is not an image so trying to convert as image per page will not work. I have never found a decent method for converting a fixed layout epub to a reflowable epub or any other format for that matter.

[Valour549]

Originally Posted by DNSB

I own the epub version of that ebook and it is a Epub3 fixed layout so I suspect the azw3 is Amazon's dumbed down and crapped up fixed layout format. The joy of fixed layout is that every element is individually positioned on the page. Each page is not an image so trying to convert as image per page will not work. I have never found a decent method for converting a fixed layout epub to a reflowable epub or any other format for that matter.

That's a shame. I was hoping there'd be some sort of setting in Calibre that just treats each page of the Kindle "as is" and slaps it onto a page of a PDF.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by Valour549

That's a shame. I was hoping there'd be some sort of setting in Calibre that just treats each page of the Kindle "as is" and slaps it onto a page of a PDF.

You'd need an azw3 renderer that can handle fixed layout and does print to pdf. I played with various renderers for epub3 FLO and never found a decent answer.