If you’ve read any of my reviews for Kobo eReaders lately, the Kobo Mini, Kobo Glo, and Kobo Aura HD, you’ll notice that I complain a lot about how Kobo chooses to format ebooks.
For Windows 7 Users: it made sense to me to create a 'library' with the locations of the various ebook related files in it. Mine has the directories for ADE, Kindle for PC Books, Calibre, the kepub file Peter referenced, and the file I setup to sync using Allway. I also have an eread misc. In je Calibre bibliotheek kun je rechtsklikken op een ebook en die versturen naar de ereader waarbij dat ebook tijdens het versturen geconverteerd wordt naar het KePub formaat (of je kunt op de Naar apparaat sturen knop in de menubalk klikken). Het orginele bestand in je bibliotheek wordt hierbij niet gewijzigd zodat je het ook nog steeds op.
My main issue is with all the wasted space. Kobo insists on adding a huge bar at the bottom of a page to display page numbers, and another huge bar at the top of the screen to display the title (seriously Kobo, like I can’t figure out what book I’m reading that I need to be reminded on every single freaking page).
There’s also the fact most Kobo ebooks have spaces between paragraphs instead of indented paragraphs, which wastes even more space. Personally I just want my ebooks to look as close as possible to the paper books I’ve been reading my whole life, which means indented paragraphs and justified text.
And don’t get me started on how much I hate the long paragraph bug that makes it so there’s even more wasted space at the bottom of the page for certain books and fonts.
The irony is that Kobo’s ereaders offer more layout and font adjusting options than any other brand, but when it comes right down to it there are too many limitations and variables to make good use of the settings. In fact I can’t think of an ebook reader or app that annoys me more than Kobo’s software.
Luckily, there’s a great free ebook tool called Calibre that you can use to re-format your ebooks to have more control over formatting. With the proper settings you can easily minimize wasted space and remove spaces between paragraphs. You can even get rid of the entire big bar of wasted space at the top of the screen (unless you are running firmware version 2.5.2).
Kobo Formatting Tip: Minimizing Wasted Space
Awhile back a reader named Evenft left a comment about what settings to use with Calibre to minimize wasted space. Here’s the procedure below, and here’s the link to some pictures showing the settings in Calibre if you need a visual.
You can use Calibre’s conversion feature to change the CSS settings in an ebook. If you are converting regular DRM-free ePubs all you have to do is import them and follow the directions below. If you want to convert purchased ebooks from Kobo you’ll have to login to your account and download the copies first, which requires using Adobe Digital Editions, and then import them into Calibre to convert them. You can also easily remove the DRM if you choose to make it so you can read your ebooks on other ereaders and apps.
– After importing the ebooks into Calibre, select the ones you want to modify and choose “Convert books”.
– Make sure the output format is ePub.
– Click on the “Look & Feel” tab. Enter the following code into the Extra CSS box:
body {orphans: 0; widows: 0}
– You can check the box to remove spaces between paragraphs too.
– There’s also the option to remove existing CSS properties for fonts, margins, and padding under “Filter Style Information”.
– You can choose to set default line spacing to 0% and margins to 0 pt as well.
Some of these settings aren’t needed depending on how the ebook is originally formatted. The two most important things are adding the extra code in the CSS box and checking to remove spaces between paragraphs.
Kepub is a term used to describe the eBook format designed for Kobobooks.
[edit]Overview
Calibre Kepub Plugin
The Kobo company has developed their own variation on standard ePubs. Kobo eReaders have an SQLite database that helps them read and manage books that come from their bookstore or another bookstore that has adopted their format. In some cases the books downloaded from their web store will be stored directly in this database and in other cases the books will be stored separately but will be referenced and managed from the database.
The application used to read these eBooks is call Nickel. It is the only reading application on a Kobo Device and can read ePub as well as PDF and CBZ formats. It is capable of working with Adobe DRM. It is also available as Kobo eReading Apps for a wide variety of platforms. While the application can read both kepub and ePub there are differences. For example the kepub can now be coded to meet the ePub 3 standard.
Kobobooks stores can also sell ePub books which can be read on any device that supports ePub. The user will need to ensure which formats are available for a particular book. Regular ePub support uses Adobe's RMSDK engine while Kobo ePub support uses NetFront's ACCESS engine.
Note that a kepub formatted book needs the extension to be .kepub.epub, that is two extensions. Otherwise it will not recognize the book as different from a normal epub.
[edit]kepub folder
If you attach a Kobo reading device to your computer via USB you will find that it mounts the reader's internal memory as an external disk drive on the computer. You can examine the contents of this area and will find a .kobo folder. (If your computer runs Linux, you may need to use the 'view hidden files' option in your preferred file manager to see the folder because its name starts with a period.)
Inside the .kobo folder you will find the SQLite database and a second folder called kepub. It holds a number of files with long numbered names and no extension, each of which contains one of the books on your device. If you copy one of them to your computer and add .zip to the end of the name so you can open it, you will find that it is really an ePub file. Most of the contents are encrypted with DRM, but some files are in plain text such as the OPF file and the CSS file. Beginning with version 1.9 of Kobo's operating system, the Kepub format became the primary type of ePub on their devices.
On a PC running Windows, you will find this same information stored at Documents and SettingsYour NameLocal SettingsApplications DataKoboKobo Desktop Edition (UsersYour Name etc. on Vista and Windows 7).
[edit]SQLite database
The Kobo.sqlite database is the heart of the Kobo system. SQLite is a standard database and you can use readily available tools to look at its content. However, the actual structure is not documented and any changes could corrupt the database so are not recommended.
[edit]Kepub compared to ePub
The kepub format is compatible with ePub leading some to theorize that they could just change the extension to .kepub.epub to make a Kepub from an ePub. However there are some differences. In a kepub, each sentence is wrapped in a span. This is assigned a unique id. The location system uses these ids. If you just change the extension, when you close and reopen a book, you will always be taken to the start of the chapter you were in. And any annotations stored will not be redisplayed in the book. A conversion of ePub to kepub will add the spans to the epubs. There are also some extra divs and CSS that the kepub ereader expects which helps with the way it does the formatting. The DRM system is also different for eBooks using DRM. Kepub also supports ePub 3 formatting which is still not supported for ePub.
[edit]DRM
Kepub files use a proprietary DRM scheme, sometimes called 'kdrm' due to its characteristic xml tags in the rights.xml file. While many kdrm-protected kepub ebooks are also available for download as regular epubs with ubiquitous Adobe DRM, this is not always the case, restricting the use of these ebooks to Kobo devices and reading applications. Tools to remove this DRM scheme have recently been developed.
[edit]Advantages
Extras features are available for eBooks being managed by the Kobo database. Some are restricted to only purchased DRM eBooks. Some are no longer applicable to latest firmware.
- highlighting of words in the document.
- multiple bookmarks of pages in the document.
- dictionary lookup of a selected word in the document.
- being able to add annotation to a highlighted word.
Comparison of Kepub and ePub with both on a Kobo device.
Positive: KePub (sideloaded):
Kepub Output
- Quicker to respond to page turn gestures (especially tap gesture)
- Faster text selection (e.g. when highlighting large areas of text)
- Support for footnote previews
- Can double-tap to zoom images
- Shows number of minutes of reading left until end of chapter
- Shows title of ebook in the header (negative for some people)
- support for ePub 3.
Positives for standard ePub on a Kobo device:
- Better hyphenation (kepub reader can hyphenate words in the wrong place if they have trailing punctuation)
- Full justification works properly (kepub reader doesn't properly justify some lines that contain certain common characters such as ellipsis and emdash)
- Better support for embedded fonts
- Full-screen mode works without fonts being cut off
- Better word spacing when using full justification
(Apart from the last, all of these ePub advantages are due to bugs in the KePub reader.)
[edit]See also
Convert Kindle To Epub Calibre
- https://github.com/kobolabs/epub-spec includes:
- Elements of the ePub spec that Kobo does and does not support.
- Features of the five Kobo reading platforms.
- Recommendations on file production and testing for content creators.
- https://github.com/pgaskin/kepubify - tool to convert epubs to kepubs