Open Request The Great Knowledge by Maria Kvilhaug

[Dayonisos]

The Great Knowledge by Maria Kvilhaug

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

Product information​

​

Publisher	‎Three Little Sisters (December 15, 2023)
Language	‎English
Paperback	‎824 pages
ISBN-10	‎1959350994
ISBN-13	‎978-1959350996

Post automatically merged: May 26, 2024

The Great Knowledge by Maria Kvilhaug

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

Product information​

​

Publisher	‎Three Little Sisters (December 15, 2023)
Language	‎English
Paperback	‎824 pages
ISBN-10	‎1959350994
ISBN-13	‎978-1959350996

E-book version appeared:

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

 

[Herne the Humbled]

When this first came out, I still had a few days left on a Kindle Unlimited free trial and snatched it up. I was excited about getting the ebook version of this one and eager to read it... until I actually opened the file. The formatting is atrocious and the kindle app cuts off several letters of every line on the right side of each page. I could figure out what most of it was saying but it was so annoying I couldn't even read it.

I loaded it into Calibre to see if I could fix it and it loaded as an azw3 file. The book wouldn't open in Calibre so I tried to convert it... it just spins its wheels endlessly, no matter which format I tried to convert it to. I tried opening the azw3 file with Calibre's ebook editor and this actually opened it. I found I could read it in the ebook editor better than the kindle app! But I'm unable to come up with a solution for fixing it. I'll show you a screen shot so you can see what a mess it is:

Maybe someone more tech-savvy than me can figure out how to turn this into a readable ebook, but if not... it's at least readable in the ebook editor! I'm not going to upload it into the bookshare section because right now, it's not really a useable ebook as far as I'm concerned. So here is the file in case you want to read it that way, or f you want to work on making it more presentable:

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

 

[HoldAll]

Good call not posting the file in Book Shares, most people wouldn't bother to install software just to be able to read a specific book - I certainly wouldn't if I was only mildly interested, so you probably did the right thing; maybe someone else will be able to convert the file, I tried but failed. Anyway, many thanks for posting it!

 

[Rowena]

I've had a quick look at that file, and it is a total mess - The internal structure & formatting is as bad as the onscreen results:
it has at least 3 different types of formatting, many of which are both redundant and attempting to over-ride each other;
some of the formatting stupidly uses absolute-positioning (which is why the text extends outside the viewing area);
all of the embedded fonts are missing;
and there is an issue I haven't identified yet that causes any attempt to sequentially-open or process the file to fail a little under half way through.
I couldn't even get a Calibre to do an unformatted text-dump of the contents.

I'll have a better look at it over the weekend, when I have more time, but it looks like it's beyond any kind of easy automated fix.

If Amazon still allow you to download in legacy formats - grabbing the mobi or azw (not azw3) may give better results, since the older formats don't support some of the more complex file formatting/structures in this document.

 

[Herne the Humbled]

Thanks Rowena, I'm glad somebody that knows what they're doing showed up! I was stalling out at exactly 47% every time too. I was especially hoping that a conversion to mobi and then to epub would help. I've had that simple trick automatically fix a lot of badly formatted ebooks before, but no dice this time. The last option I came up with was to remove all that useless code between every single word...for over 800 pages. Yeah, right. That ain't gonna happen. If you can manage to fix it you'll be officially and indisputably proving yourself to be Goddess of Ebooks!

 

[Rowena]

I know the OP is now gone, but this looks like an interesting book, so I'm going to continue working on it, so here are the results so far:

The original document formatting is an attempt to force a page-by-page emulation of the layout of the print version as an ebook, including a lot of things that just don't work on most ereaders - fixed page & font sizes, absolute text & object positioning, multi-column layouts, colored backgrounds, and various types of background & border images being the main offenders here. This mess looks like it was automatically generated, so it was probably a lazy or incompetent publisher exporting the print-master directly from their DTP software without any understanding of how ebooks are supposed to be formatted. As a result - there is simply no simple fix for this, it's not just a case of editing some CSS, the whole book probably needs to be re-edited and re-formatted from scratch in order to fix the design & layout errors.

For the time being, I have managed to do a somewhat brute-force conversion of it to epub, which means it can now be read on a computer or large tablet without trimming the text - but the underlying design & format errors remain, so it will look ugly, and will not display correctly on anything with a small screen.

Here are the original azw3, and the current WIP epub conversion for anyone who wants them:

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!