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fogbrain
Participating Frequently
May 17, 2015
Question

I cannot download epubs to ADE from Google Play. I get error 2038. I can download from Project Gutenberg. What can I do?

  • May 17, 2015
  • 1 reply
  • 6459 views

The last two books I purchased from Google Play will not download to Adobe Digital Editions on my iMac running OSX 10.9.5.  To see if the problem affected all epub downloads instead of just Google play books, I tried downloading books from Overdrive and Project Gutenberg.  There was no problem.  It seems to me that this outcome suggests that the problem is with google, not ADE and not my iMac.  Is that a reasonable conclusion?  If not, I would appreciate any advice.  If so, how do I convince Google that the problem might be on their end.  The support people at Google don't seem to have a setup that they can use to test a download to ADE.

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1 reply

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fogbrainAuthor
Participating Frequently
May 18, 2015

I found a workaround.  When I try to download from Google Play site to ADE I get error 2038 telling me of an I/O network error, and the download fails.  The error message gives me the URL for the book I was trying to download.  If I enter that URL directly into my browser it launches a process that looks exactly the same as if I had chosen the "Download ePub" option, but this time it works. I guess that means that the part that is broken is the "Download ePub" functionality in Google Play.

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    fogbrainAuthor
    Participating Frequently
    May 18, 2015

    In my last message, when I said I found a workaround, I was only partially right.  The method I described allowed me to download the book to my imac, and it opened in ADE.  But ADE was just reading it, and had not added the book to the library.  The good news was that I was able to use ADE functionality to add the book to my ADE library.  So far so good.  But apparently the copy that now resides in ADE does not allow copying to an ereader device.  So, my problem is only partly solved.  I can successfully download the book and make it a part of my ADE library.  But I cannot transfer it to my kobo - which was the objective of the whole exercise.

    So I am hoping that I have given enough info to Google that the company can decide that the issue is not with ADE and can give some attention the issue.

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    Deborah_Craytor
    Participant
    May 22, 2015

    I am having the same problem, although the error message I am getting is different:  Error getting License.  License Server Communication Problem:  E_STREAM-ERROR.  When I tried from a different computer using an older version of ADE, I got the same 2038 error code you got:

    Tiny_Sunbirds_Far_Away:

    IO Error on Network Request.

    Please check your network connection and try again.

    Network Path:

    https://books.google.com/books/download/Tiny_Sunbirds_Far_Away.epub?acsid=urn:uuid:a709a12b-3f13-2a56-c42c-1a4188bf8e7f&output=acs4_book_bytes

    Event Detail:

    Error #2038

    I can't try your partial workaround because I am not at my work computer today; when I tried it on this computer, I get the following error message:  Unable to open Tiny_Sunbirds_Far_Away.epub.  Errors were encountered in this item C:\Users\user\Downloads\Tiny_Sunbirds_Far_Away.epub.

    Like you, I can download without difficulty from Overdrive and Kobo.  I hope somebody here can help; otherwise, I'm going to stop purchasing from Google because, although I can read my books in the Google Play app on my tablet, I can't back them up to my desktop (which makes me very nervous ever since Barnes & Noble made it impossible to back up ebooks purchased there).

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