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Here’s another email to share with you.  This time from Chris Taylor-Davies:

I have been reading ebooks for nearly 10 years now, and have amassed a large (perhaps very large) library. After being locked out of some of my early MS Reader purchases I have endeavoured to only buy formats that I can clean the DRM wrapper off for future proofing. This has worked well, and I have been able to bring my books to PDA, Windows Mobile phones, iPhones, Sony Reader and iPad. This is a familiar path to many ebook veterans, but I present this as a bit of background to my current tale.

One of my favourite set of books, and one that I have been waiting to arrive in ebook format, is the Patrick O’Brian series of tales about Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin. I have these in battered paperbacks, and also in audio book from Audible. Nevertheless I would be happy to buy them again in ebook format for convenience. So I was delighted to discover that they have just been released, with the joy slightly tempered by the fact that their publisher has a pretty indifferent record with ebooks, being by far the worst offender in my library for error-strewn titles. I downloaded a sample through iBooks and it looked clean, the opening ship diagram was reasonably sized, viewable on 10″ screen without obvious pixellation. No OCR errors were visible. The only wrinkle was that the cover was missing – a fairly frequent problem with eBooks, and one easy enough to remedy.

So I purchased the book from Kobo, where I have purchased many titles. I don’t like, or use, their reader software, but the titles are standard ADE ePub files, easily liberated and sideloaded into iBooks or Bluefire Reader. However, this title is grievously polluted with custom CSS and Javascript so that it only displays nicely in the Kobo app. In iBooks it displays in a monstrous font size, even at the smallest setting that iBooks allows. This is worse than DRM. This is embedding metadata into the book, presumably after it was supplied by the publisher, that ties it to a vendors software. It may be a mistake, and they haven’t checked to see that the CSS/JS combo they use degrades satisfactorily in readers that don’t understand it. However it arose, this renders this title unusable in the reader of my choice, even though that reader fully supports ADE DRM. The ebook has been damaged by the vendor.

Unless there is some way to detect books that have been Kobo-ised I can no longer buy from them. I have a ticket open with them, but doubt that they will be able to supply a clean copy. I hope this isn’t the start of a trend.

Chris’ blog is here.

30 COMMENTS

  1. Kobo is apparently sabotaging publishers’ epubs by including their own css and a javascript file and forcing the use of their styles rather than the original ones, which effectively makes these books practically unreadable on any device besides a kobo. The resulting files are no longer valid epub files in addition to the various other problems since these added files are “hidden” (not referenced in the content.ofp file). It appears to be a problem with all Kobo branches since it is also the case with books sold via French and British Kobo bookstores. Kobo has recently taken over the ebookstore of the biggest French bookstore chain, Fnac, however Kobo France has been unwilling to comment so far (despite the anger of fnac customers).

    There is an article here by feedbooks (nice bookstore which does not sabotage the books…) co-founder Hadrien Gardeur on the topic; it’s in french but you can use google translate. He’s also planning to make an english version very shortly.

    https://plus.google.com/u/0/107252663012827113536/posts/9gmCxWEaqDx

  2. Screen books disengage persistence and display. This unlinking compounds delivery scenarios, disrupts editorial control, disturbs typographic refinement and multiplies the separated display and storage costs. Legibility is negotiable.

    Many annoyances and frustrations with e-books derive from this disengagement. Proofing is defaulted to the crowd since reflexive correcting between separated served and displayed representations is too problematic. Proof reading is shifted from up-stream in traditional print, to way down-stream. Meanwhile multiple storage formats are variously incompatible with various display devices.

  3. I have purchased roughly 150 books from the Kobo website. I use the kepub formats because I read on my Touch, my phone, and now on the Vox, so the syncing is important to me. My husband only reads ePUBs which have magically become DRM free before they land on his Kobo WiFi.

    Out of the 150 books, I had one that was basically unreadable in kepub format. It was fine as an Adobe ePUB without DRM. I had another book that was fine as a kepub, but unusable in Adobe ADE or as a DRM free book. In both instances, the publisher needed to send Kobo new files. This is not a Kobo only issue of course–pretty much every on-line site has, from time to time, had the publisher provide a wonky file, or a file in the wrong format for that particular seller (which was the issue with my second example).

    It’s rotten when you run into this sort of thing. However, Kobo isn’t trying to get one over on you and it is not the precursor of a catastrophic event in the future. It’s just a bad file.

  4. So, basically; Kobo is now distributing ebooks in their own proprietary flavor of epub?
    Not terribly different from Apple or B&N, is it?
    And nobody can naysay them.
    Proves just how stable a “standard” epub is, doesn’t it?
    A standard with no teeth is no standard, but a recommendation.

  5. Kobo is a real headache for anyone who loads to them through Smashwords. They don’t seem to be able to get any data straight. From wrong or missing book covers to duplicate books under different (wrong) isbns, and prices that are all over the map, they really make a person question if you really need them as a distribution channel.

  6. I don’t believe, at this time, that this is being done on purpose. However, with CS in shambles, there’s not much option to let Kobo know “you’ve done goofed.”. I guess what is really needed is an automated refund procedure to ‘undo’ a purchase if you get something you don’t like. I bet Kobo would be faster to notice bad files then.

  7. I have bought many books from Kobo as 100+ and have never experienced the same problem or any problem for that matter, and I’ve bought three or four books in the past several days.

    This smacks of irresponsible journalism – Why would you post an article based solely on one persons conjecture based on one purchase.

    An earlier article attacked Wired magazine because it picked the Kobo Touch over the Amazon Kindle and Nook or Sony (don’t recall which now.)

    I am starting to lose trust in this site, this just seems like cheap journalism to me.

    Let me also state I’m not an employee, own stock or have any connection with Kobo at all other than being a customer.

  8. I stopped buying from Kobo a couple months ago after I price-checked a few books and found that even with a coupon code discount, they were still cheaper at Amazon. I respect what they were doing with supporting local authors and regional content, but for me, price is a factor and Amazon is just cheaper for the vast majority of books I buy. I also am a little wary of the recent takeover move. Everyone said Fictionwise wouldn’t change after they got bought out, and they basically slid into obsolescence within months.

  9. I would tend to agree with fbr, I would not raise such an alarm on possibly very small numbers. I also have bought about 60 books from Kobo and after “liberating” them have had no problems, using Calibre, to convert them or bring them over to other reader, be they software or hardware. Infact I have a Nook STR and I do not have these problems. To be totally fair, sometimes there are small differences in fonts and sizes, but not to the extent that is mentioned. So it could well be a very minor point.

    @joanna: it may depend on single ebooks, but many times the prices on Kobo, even in after conversion in euros, are cheaper than Amazon, although Amazon has the biggest choice, in some cases. If you try to buy the Deathstalker series from Simon Green, for example, you will find that Kobo stocks them all, Amazon does not. And kobo discounts,especially now, are great, even if restricted to single ebooks.

  10. @fbr, as author of said letter, I have purchased over a hundred ebooks from Kobo, and this was the first that I had a problem with. I thought it was clear that it was a new situation, and that the worry was that it may represent a new way of Kobo wrapping ebooks. I am not sure where the conjecture lies – the book contains kobo labelled stylesheets and javascript (I pulled it apart and looked at it). There is an article inked in the comments which covers the same information, albeit in French.

  11. Christo,

    The conjecture is, “the worry was that it may represent a new way of Kobo wrapping ebooks.” Which as you say is based on one experience.

    I don’t fault you for writing an e-mail about something you are unhappy with. I would do the same thing. I am often skeptical of publishers, reseller’s intention’s when it comes to e-books. I don’t many of us would argue the fact that their record to date has been decidedly poor.

    I thought it was a bad decision on the part of Paul Biba to “publicize it” further, without additional evidence that this was Kobo policy and not a random incident.

  12. I buy mainly from Kobo, because they are one of the few sites that cater for NZ buyers. I recently noticed issues with Kobo’s eBooks having large font sizes and displaying only the first page of each chapter in iBooks. A thread on the MobileRead forum suggested loading the eBook into Calibre, which I always do anyway, convert the book to .mobi, and then convert the .mobi file to .epub. This workaround has been working fine for me and my new eBook purchases display the correct number of pages instead of just 30 or so. The occasional eBook I have been able to purchase from BooksOnBoard haven’t had these issues

  13. In the name of science, I bought another new release from Kobo. Same thing. This is not a random error. This is Kobo’s new policy, and explains the resounding silence we’ve gotten since I first mentioned it. All epubs downlaoded from Kobo (for new books, they haven’t yet re-formated the old ones) are now getting mangled so they only work properly on Kobo software. I can’t believe how slimy this company has become in just a few months. This non-sense really has to be broadcast loudly.

  14. @rashkae

    Your response puzzles me. I just downloaded another book from Kobo without problem again this morning. I used an HTC flyer and Mantano Reader. I then opened it in Aldiko and IB Reader. I noticed when I opened it in Aldiko and IB Reader the font size was larger than I normally use. However, adjusting the font size worked normally, so no problem.

    I wonder if this problem is related to a specific reader (Nook, Sony etc) or some combination of e-reader and software?

  15. The problem is that the book has this kobo.css file attached.

    html
    {
    height: 100% !important;
    margin: 0 !important;
    }
    body
    {
    font-size: 18pt !important;
    line-height: 1.575em !important;
    font-family: ‘Georgia’ !important;
    margin: 0 !important;
    height: 100% !important;
    padding-left: 0 !important;
    padding-right: 0 !important;
    padding-top: 0 !important;
    }
    .KBHeading, h1
    {
    margin-top: 0 !important;
    display: block !important;
    text-align: center !important;
    font-family: ‘Georgia’ !important;
    font-size: 1.33em !important;
    text-transform: uppercase !important;
    letter-spacing: 0.1em !important;
    }
    .KBSubheading, h2
    {
    margin-top: 0 !important;
    display: block !important;
    text-align: center !important;
    font-family: ‘Georgia’ !important;
    font-size: 1.25em !important;
    }
    .KBSubsubheading, h3, h4, h5, h6
    {
    margin-top: 0 !important;
    font-size: 1em !important;
    font-family: ‘Georgia’ !important;
    font-weight: bold !important;
    }
    a:link
    {
    color: #1DAEC7 !important;
    }
    a:visited
    {
    color: #1DAEC7 !important;
    }
    a:hover
    {
    color: #1DAEC7 !important;
    }
    a:active
    {
    color: #1DAEC7 !important;
    }

    p, div
    {
    line-height: 1.575em !important;
    text-indent: 0 !important;
    margin: 0 !important;
    padding-left: 0 !important;
    padding-right: 0 !important;
    padding-top: 0 !important;
    padding-bottom: 1.0em !important;
    }

    You are correct, of course, that most e-readers will let you adjust the font (and I never said otherwise). The line height, paragraph padding and margins, however, owerwrite the default formatting that the book was made with. The javascript file is causing other issues with software that doesn’t handle it gracefully. I would offer screenhots of ADE to show how terrible this looks (one with the kobo.css, the other with the book fixed.) However, I don’t have an image host account ready to use and am on my way out the door for xmas holiday.

  16. For those still following the story here, Kobo has finally acknowledged the issue, stated that it is not their intention, and a team is working on fixing this and replacing affected books.

    That only took a month from the time I first reported it to them.

  17. There are two formats that Kobo uses for ebooks.

    The proprietary Kobo CSS stylesheet (and js) is only included in kepubs (kobo epub). These are ebooks downloaded via WiFi directly to a Kobo eReader device, Kobo App, or using Kobo Desktop.

    I prefer to download the original publisher formatted epubs on via the Kobo website. These epub files are NOT altered by Kobo in any way! (At least none of my purchases have been)

    PREREQUISITE: Install Adobe Digital Editions on your computer. Authorize with the Adobe ID you use for Kobo purchases.

    1. Log in to your Kobo account on your Mac/PC using your web browser (not the Kobo Desktop application).

    2. Click ‘My Library’, then select ‘Purchased’.
    Alternatively you can go to ‘My Account’, then ‘Purchase HIstory’, then click a book title.

    3. Click the blue ‘Adobe DRM EPUB’ button.
    This will download a file called URLLink.acsm
    Double click the file, Adobe Digital Editions will open and download the epub.

    If you are using a Kobo eReader (Wifi, Touch or Vox):
    1. Plug in your Kobo. It will mount as a drive, open it.
    2. Open the folder Adobe Digital Editions uses to store your epub files.
    3. Drag the desired epub to your Kobo Ereader (this is called side loading).
    4. Eject your device. Read happy!

    If you are using an iPad/iPod/iPhone:
    1. Install the Kobo or BlueFire Reader app on your device. These are the only apps that read Adobe DRM epubs. Make sure you authorize the app using your Adobe ID.

    2. Open iTunes with your device connected.

    3. Select your device, then the APPS tab, scroll down to File Sharing, then select the Kobo or BlueFire app.

    4. Either click ‘Add’ or drag the desired epub into the window (the one directly above the Add button). Click Sync.

    6. Eject your device. Read happy!

  18. I was just forced to update my kobo desktop and much to my shagrin none of my ebooks that I had from other sources other than the kobo store work. When I open them up the desktop reader crashes. Looks like kobo has done away with any compatibliy and say if you did not get them from us you can not read them on our product. Which totally sucks cause I liked thier product until the forced update.

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