Every now and again I come across an .epub that other readers (iBooks, Calibre, Neo Reader on my Boox devices, the built-in reader on Kobo) process without difficulty, but which for some reason is unreadable by DT – won’t index, display, or show contents in Inspector. A replicable example is Kobo Store purchases converted to epub by Calibre, whether through the Obok plugin or Adobe Digital Editions. Does anyone know of a workaround? I’ve taken a look under the hood at the internals of a couple of offending files, but haven’t been able to spot anything obviously malformed.
To be clear, I don’t think this is an issue with DT, nor am I expecting the DEVONtech team to sort it out – I’m pretty sure it’s caused by some minor corruption in the files. But I’ve seen this issue frequently enough that someone savvier about the epub format may have encountered it and know what lies behind it.
Huh. I’ve just discovered that, at least with conversions from Kobo, converting the epub to an epub in Calibre fixes the issue and DT can process the file normally. But I’d never have thought of trying that if I hadn’t posted the above and then thought, hang on, let’s exhaust all the obviously silly recourses first… So no need for anybody to respond (or for me to go messing with the guts of my epubs) – but if anyone else does have the same issue, that seems to be a fix.
Good thought! This thread seemed to point in a similar direction:
– and I’ve just found this fantastic tip from @meowky about using Safari’s Web Inspector on epubs (as an alternative to Calibre’s rather crude validation):