Problems with two epub Bibles

[SomeSteve]

I don't know if this is the right forum for this. If not, perhaps somebody would be kind enough to direct me to the appropriate place.

I downloaded two free Bibles, one a King James Version from gutenberg.org -

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/7999.epub.noimages

the other the Net Bible from bible.org -

http://ftp.bible.org/netbible/epub/NETNOTELESS.epub.zip

The King James Version displays correctly on a Slick E-Reader 7 (which I think is some kind of Kobo), but (after the introductory Gutenberg stuff) not on the Sony PRS-T2. There seem to be layers of text that overlap on the Sony.

The Net Bible displays correctly on the Sony, but the Slick won't open it at all. There is an error message: Invalid format.

Does anybody have an idea what might be the problem with these two files?

Thanks.

[Doitsu]

The problems are most likely cause by the file size. Both bibles are much larger than most regular ebooks. You could try the following:
- Download Calibre and do an epub-to-epub conversion. This might streamline the books.
- Search the ePub section of the Patricia Clark Memorial Library at MR (They have a couple of different bible versions.)

[mrmikel]

IMO, epub is an afterthought at the gutenberg sites. They are just glad to preserve books in the first place, but epub is a format which they regard as not being as permanent as text. Much effort and thought has gone into some of the Bibles here at MR.

[SomeSteve]

Thanks for your comments. As suggested, I downloaded a couple of versions at MR, which at first glance look very nice.

One of them displays italics and notes in such a manner that they appear light gray, which makes readability on my Sony less than ideal, but I suppose there's no easy way to change that.

[Jellby]

It depends, it may be simply a matter of removing a color property in the CSS.

[mrmikel]

If they are individually specified as colors, you could locate one place where it is light when you have it open in Sigil and do a search and replace it 000000, if wanted to go all dark, or 111111 if that would bring it up dark enough. They are Red, Green and Blue in hexidecimal with 000000 being black and FFFFFF being white.

If it is the CSS, again just search for an occurence of it in Sigil, find the class in the stylesheet (.light for example) then try changing whatever you find there and save it with a new name. Then try it out.

If you fix it then you might contribute it back to library to help others with similar readers.

This is resource for colors:
http://www.w3schools.com/html/html_colornames.asp
and w3schools.com is a very useful reference that can give you the tools to make new e-books or fix up ones the way you like them.

[JSWolf]

Gutenberg's automated ePub creation is poor. So it's not surprising that the Bible they auto-generated doesn't work well.

[SomeSteve]

Originally Posted by mrmikel

If they are individually specified as colors, you could locate one place where it is light when you have it open in Sigil and do a search and replace it 000000, if wanted to go all dark, or 111111 if that would bring it up dark enough. They are Red, Green and Blue in hexidecimal with 000000 being black and FFFFFF being white.

If it is the CSS, again just search for an occurence of it in Sigil, find the class in the stylesheet (.light for example) then try changing whatever you find there and save it with a new name. Then try it out.

If you fix it then you might contribute it back to library to help others with similar readers.

Thanks for your comments and the specific instructions. I think I'll give it a try, when I have the time.

As for contributing it back to the library, since I'm new at this, I'm afraid of messing something up, and then contributing a messed up copy. But I'll see how it goes.

[SomeSteve]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Gutenberg's automated ePub creation is poor. So it's not surprising that the Bible they auto-generated doesn't work well.

Thanks for the insight. I had (have) no idea how those copies were produced.