Google Play Books - Now with added awesome

[jethro10]

Originally Posted by Teknikal

I'm not keen on uploading books either one by one and that in part is why I won't be using it.

I have plenty of issues with Google book's but this is not one of them.
On a PC, you can drag and drop multiple books.
Not sure why people think it's a one by one approach - it's just like Google Doc's interface. Drag a bunch, go have a coffee, books uploaded.

J

[hbtaylor]

I have a problem with a couple of books I uploaded. They upload just fine and I can read them without problems, but the Table of Contents is incorrect. It shows just 1 entry in the Contents window, and the entry is the file name/title of the book.

When I use that same book file in Marvin on the iPad, the sections and chapters are correct, and it is also correct on various readers on my Android phone. I uploaded 4 EPUBs to test, and 2 have correct Contents but 2 are incorrect.

I'm going to dig in to the EPUB contents themselves to see if I can figure out if there is something that triggers it for some but not others, but I thought I'd see if anyone else saw it and/or had insight.

I don't know what kind of processing Google does on upload or what it might be doing differently when building the contents entries.

[tomsem]

Originally Posted by hbtaylor

I have a problem with a couple of books I uploaded. They upload just fine and I can read them without problems, but the Table of Contents is incorrect. It shows just 1 entry in the Contents window, and the entry is the file name/title of the book.

When I use that same book file in Marvin on the iPad, the sections and chapters are correct, and it is also correct on various readers on my Android phone. I uploaded 4 EPUBs to test, and 2 have correct Contents but 2 are incorrect.

I'm going to dig in to the EPUB contents themselves to see if I can figure out if there is something that triggers it for some but not others, but I thought I'd see if anyone else saw it and/or had insight.

I don't know what kind of processing Google does on upload or what it might be doing differently when building the contents entries.

I checked several of mine and they all have TOC. On both Android and iOS. Wonder what epubcheck would say about the books that aren't working for you?

[hbtaylor]

Originally Posted by tomsem

I checked several of mine and they all have TOC. On both Android and iOS. Wonder what epubcheck would say about the books that aren't working for you?

It returns a couple of items, but nothing related to the TOC. I get some "element not allowed" and "element incomplete" in individual chapter/split files, but no warnings or errors related to the TOC.

An EPUB that DOES give me some TOC warnings ("identical playOrder values" kinds of things) actually displays the TOC correctly.

I'm sure it will end up being some kind of esoteric difference, and I'll probably dig in to files of mine that work and don't work and see if I can figure out the reasons for the differences. I'll also need to upload more content so I can get a bigger sample size to see how widespread it is for the books I check. I probably won't explore it too much if I find that I just happened to find the 2 examples of the problem for me.

Thanks for the information.

[Candiana]

I'm having the same "table of contents" not shown problem. I've tried many options in calibre and the problem persists only on google books. Please share if you can resolve this

[hbtaylor]

I did a little bit of digging. I decided to look at the EPUB contents to see if anything stood out. I'm a neophyte when it comes to EPUB innards, but I figured it would be a good learning experience.

I downloaded Sigil to take a look. When I opened 2 of the 3 books that were giving me problems, I noticed that they had nice Tables of Contents already. The third book had a one-item TOC, so I discarded it on the assumption that was just how the book was put together (without a meaningful TOC structure).

I decided to give Sigil's "Generate TOC" a spin, and did so for one of the books. When I uploaded that one to GPB, it had a good TOC! I looked at the other, and it had a nested TOC (but used h1 tags for all of them), and I didn't want to manually fix that up, so I thought, "I wonder what happens if I just open it and save it?". Sure enough, doing that made the TOC display correctly (nested and all) in GPB.

So, Sigil can do something to clear up the problem books. I know it is cleaning up and re-arranging, since the directory structure is different (created an OEBPS folder, moved the HTML files into a "text" folder, etc.), and I'm guessing something about that makes GPB like it more. I haven't dug in to specific differences to specific files (and may not, unless the mood strikes me), but it looks like I can open the EPUB in Sigil and save it back as a work around. I use calibre to manage my books, so I'll probably just save off an original_epub to be safe and try that.

If there is someone who is wise in the ways of the EPUB, they might be able to shed some light on why that save/cleanup has a positive effect.

h.b.

[Teknikal]

Was playing with my old ipod touch earlier and noticed Google books on the store there, so that's another advantage, right now I have three devices that can see the books I upload when I thought it was only two.

[citac]

Useless to me as Google Books are inaccessible in my country.

[shrik]

This is awesome, just tested this with a couple of uploads and I can read the books fine!

Does anyone know how I can get the book covers to show up though? The two epubs I uploaded have separate JPEG files in their directories that serve as cover art usually, but I didn't see any option to upload an associated cover photo.

[tomsem]

Originally Posted by shrik

This is awesome, just tested this with a couple of uploads and I can read the books fine!

Does anyone know how I can get the book covers to show up though? The two epubs I uploaded have separate JPEG files in their directories that serve as cover art usually, but I didn't see any option to upload an associated cover photo.

Which platform? (Android, ios, browser).

Covers show for most of the books I have uploaded, except for one that I created, and on ios, a couple others do not show. I used a high resolution image for the one I created (using Sigil) and I suspect it is having trouble with that, while other apps show them all. So I would play around with pixel dimensions and see if that helps. Or maybe it is something about the opf.

[shrik]

Originally Posted by tomsem

Which platform? (Android, ios, browser).

I don't see the book cover in both the Play Books app on my Nexus 7, and the web app in the browser. When I open the book in the Play Books app, the first page of the epub shows a cover image, but this cover image just doesn't show up in the bookshelf/library area.

Could this mean there's something wrong with the epub itself?

[glnnjnsn]

Originally Posted by shrik

I don't see the book cover in both the Play Books app on my Nexus 7, and the web app in the browser. When I open the book in the Play Books app, the first page of the epub shows a cover image, but this cover image just doesn't show up in the bookshelf/library area.

Could this mean there's something wrong with the epub itself?

When did you upload the files?
From my own personal experience, the epubs I uploaded could be read minutes after uploading, but the covers did not show up properly until the next day. I just figured it took longer to process them and/or they had to pass some sort of inspection.

[shrik]

Originally Posted by glnnjnsn

When did you upload the files?
From my own personal experience, the epubs I uploaded could be read minutes after uploading, but the covers did not show up properly until the next day. I just figured it took longer to process them and/or they had to pass some sort of inspection.

You're right, the covers showed up earlier last night! Guess it just took a bit longer to process them out of the epub file.

[Candiana]

Originally Posted by hbtaylor

So, Sigil can do something to clear up the problem books. I know it is cleaning up and re-arranging, since the directory structure is different (created an OEBPS folder, moved the HTML files into a "text" folder, etc.), and I'm guessing something about that makes GPB like it more. .

thanks hbtaylor... your efforts helped my GPB TOC problem as well. I just opened + saved the problem epub under Sigil and voila it now shows TOC in google books.

[Brianrh]

Am I the only person to have problems synchronising reading position between devices with Google Play Books.

It seems to synch nicely between my two Android devices i.e tablet & phone but in my browser on my PC there is often perhaps up to 20 pages difference always behind the position I actually read to on my tablet. At the end of reading on my tablet I exit the book to get back to the book menu and always have the Wifi on while the tablet is not a sleep.

Anyone else find anything similar?