azw3 comic not rendering

[tph]

I have an azw3 file for a comic, which displays normally in the Kindle app on my phone. When I load it into Calibre I find a bunch of non-pages (I hit page down and the display is white, page number doesn't increment, but if I do it enough times I get to the next page) and I find some corrupted pages (display all black or with a partial image.

I am at a loss on how to handle this. Any guidance could help.

Calibre 1.25.0 on Ubuntu.

[tph]

Same happens on Calibre 3.4

I could see the blank pages being due to Amazon's panel mode doing something strange, but the corrupted pages?

[BetterRed]

@tph- try reading in a different program - preferably one from Amazon. Some Kindle formats have unbreakable DRM and other hindrances to reading their books.

If you find one, use calibre's Open With feature to view it from calibre GUI. It's in View->View specific format, select AZW3, click Open With button (bottom left).

BR

[jhowell]

Comics in AZW3 format use a fixed layout that is proprietary to Amazon and not supported by calibre.

[kovidgoyal]

Your best bet is to simply opent h azw3 file in the calibre editor selecta ll the images files, rght click and export them to a folder on your computer and zip that folder up into a cbz file, which calibre (and other software) can convert/view.

[DavidG42]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

Your best bet is to simply opent h azw3 file in the calibre editor selecta ll the images files, rght click and export them to a folder on your computer and zip that folder up into a cbz file, which calibre (and other software) can convert/view.

Although it's a year old, this thread seems closest to what I'm looking for. Trying to keep the info in one place ...

[Edited to add: I am trying to extract all the page images from a 300 page / 74MB comic which I have as an AZW3 file. The Calibre conversion from AZW3 to any other format falls over (with a "memory error" although the resource monitor shows only 40% of memory used) so extracting the images seems like a sensible idea since I want to end up with a CBZ anyway.]

In my case, all the images have names in random order. For example, in part0001.html (the second html component of the book) the referenced image file is 00159.jpeg. And this is shown as page 14 according to the page number in image. (So presumably its sequence position in the book is something greater than 14 since there would be pages before the offical "Page 1".) So, is there a way to rename all the image files so that they will sort in order in the file system or in a CBZ when opened by a typical CBZ reader?

(You'll probably realise I don't know much about this.)

[kovidgoyal]

Select al limage files, right click, choose bulk rename and rename in book order

[DavidG42]

I really appreciate the effectively immediate response.

Unfortunately "AZW3 books do not support file renaming as they do not use file names internally. The filenames you see are automatically generated from the internal structures of the original file." according to the resulting error message.

[kovidgoyal]

Convert to epub first and edit that then you will be able to rename files.

[DavidG42]

Ah, I was afraid you would say that. Unfortunately the conversion from AZW3 to anything else always falls over at 47% complete with:

[ ... ]
Detecting structure...
Flattening CSS and remapping font sizes...
Python function terminated unexpectedly
(Error Code: 1)
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "site.py", line 101, in main
File "site.py", line 78, in run_entry_point
File "site-packages\calibre\utils\ipc\worker.py", line 195, in main
File "site-packages\calibre\gui2\convert\gui_conversion.py", line 33, in gui_convert_override
File "site-packages\calibre\gui2\convert\gui_conversion.py", line 26, in gui_convert
File "site-packages\calibre\ebooks\conversion\plumber.py", line 1209, in run
File "site-packages\calibre\ebooks\oeb\transforms\flatcss.py" , line 215, in __call__
File "site-packages\calibre\ebooks\oeb\transforms\flatcss.py" , line 316, in stylize_spine
File "site-packages\calibre\ebooks\oeb\stylizer.py", line 226, in __init__
File "site-packages\css_selectors\select.py", line 177, in __call__
File "site-packages\css_selectors\select.py", line 195, in iterparsedselector
File "site-packages\css_selectors\select.py", line 389, in select_class
MemoryError

I guess my next step is to file an error report on the conversion. That's a job for another day, as it's rather late in this time zone.

Thanks for suggestions.

[kovidgoyal]

switch to using calibre 64bit and you should be fine.

[DavidG42]

Ummm ... now I will go and hide in a corner with a red face.

Somehow in the years I have been using Calibre I never noticed that there is a 64-bit version and I'm not using it. I've had 64-bit systems for a long time ... but not a 64-bit Calibre.

The epub conversion went through successfully this time, so I will now have a look at the image renaming and extraction process again.

THANK YOU!

[DavidG42]

(A) Finishing the conversation above about Calibre versions:

Having upgraded to the latest 64-bit version, I find that I can convert a 45MB comic from AZW3 to something else (I don't recall whether that worked before), but it still falls over with a memory error at 47% converted for the 75MB comics in the same set. So this didn't solve the problem for the larger files.

===================

(B) However I have now found a process to extract all the images ready for repackaging into CBZ. (CBZ was my goal in this whole exercise, although it could equally have been CBR or PDF.)

Here's what I did; I hope it helps somebody else who may be facing the same set of problems.

(1) In Calibre, use the Kindle Unpack add-in to convert each of the AZW3 comics files into epub.

Whereas the native Calibre conversion from AZW3 to any other format always got stuck with a memory error at 47% on large AZW3 files (the limit was somewhere between 45MB and 74MB) the Kindle Unpack plug-in worked without a hitch to convert all the files to epub.

(2) In Calibre, select each epub individually, right-click for the context menu, and select "Edit book". Choose the epub format.

(3) In the editor, go to the images folder and highlight all the images.

At this point there is a problem: all the image file-names inside the epub are in random order and do not correspond to the order in which the images appear in the book. Hence the next step.

(4) Right-click (context menu) and select "Bulk rename all selected files". Make sure the "Rename files according to their book order" option is selected. Run the rename process.

(5) Right-click (context menu) and "Export all the selected files".

Now all the image files are extracted into a single folder with file names in logical order.

(6) Finally, it's a trivial process to zip the image files into a single zip file and rename the file as a CBZ file.

.. David

Currently 2 AZW3 files done, another 48 to go ...