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Defective iBook

P

paulold

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Mar 3, 2008
401
5
Washington, DC
I downloaded a sample of a book from the iBooks store and decided I wanted to get the full book. The sample was actually kinda wimpy - 10 pages but most were the extraneous pages (e.g. title page). I downloaded the full book by clicking on the purchase button that appears within the sample. But what I got is only 18 pages long! And it's a bit messed up.

So I tried deleting the book from my iPad and then re-downloaded it. Same thing. Only 18 pages. This was my first book purchase. What do I do?
 
Another problem

This one you could check out yourself. Get the sample of Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman and got to the first poem. The text is somehow cut off on the left side. And it's like that for the rest of the pages. What is going on here? Is this a problem created by the publisher? By the app? By Apple? Pretty disappointing considering I'm most excited about having a book reader.
 
I have downloaded other books (free and paid) which have appeared to be fine.

I figured out how to share epub files so I had my friend try the faulty copy of the full, paid "Second Nature" by Alice Hoffman. And he has the same problems with it. It's like the formatting is messed up on the file. The file size seems right for a full book, but it only appears to be 18 pages long when you look at in iBooks. It looks like all of the text for each chapter is trying to fit onto the first page of the chapter. So there are 18 pages because this book has 18 chapters. The title pages are messed up too. All the text runs into each other like the line spacing and tabs are missing. Duh - I should make some screenshots. I'll do so when I have internet. No wifi at work...

I should also say that I've tried restarting the iPad, deleting and re-downloading the book, and even redownloading iBooks. I will have to try re-downloading the Walt Whitman sample - maybe it was fixed since I posted my message, which would explain why it looks fine on your iPad. My instincts say this is a problem with the epub file itself.

But my friend and I have seen some problems with the iPad that were resolved by restarting. The iPad is just like our iPhones - when you add new apps, it's best to restart it before using anything. Unfortunately, in this case it didn't fix the books.
 
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