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Hello everybody,
I've got some books from Kobo and stumbled across a problem, I cannot solve on my own. I'm gonna try to be as specific as I can with the whole situation, so please bear with me (TL:DR at the end).
1. The books in question
Beginning on the 01.07.2023 (07/01/2023) to the 22.07.2023 (07/22/2023), HumbleBundle offered a bundle containing the Baki (also known as New Grappler Baki) manga series (31 volumes and with it 31 ebooks in total, see https://www.humblebundle.com/books/baki-collection-books). Purchasing said bundle gave me activation codes, which I could use to redeem the books (BAKI Volume books, not the Chapter ones) on Kobo. Having redeemed the codes, I started downloading the ebooks (through .acsm files provided by Kobo) in Adobe Digital Editions (ADE) onto my computer, since I'd like to have the books stored locally.
2. The issue I'm facing
The downloaded books are all secured through DRM measurements, which is not the problem per se. The issue I'm having is, that the images of these books are being rendered way to small to read the story in any way:
(two pages of the book "BAKI 1"; see viewer_broken.png in the attachments).
To grasp, just how impossible it is to read anything in the picture above, here a screenshot of a working ebook:
(two pages of the book "One-Punch Man Volume 1" (which I funnily enough also bought on Kobo); see viewer_working.png in the attachments).
But I would argue, that not only the content of said books is way too small, but the thumbnail is also off:
(the thumbnail of the BAKI book is in my opinion too pixelated, but I'm not sure whether that's just on me or even relevant; see gallery.png in the attachments).
2.5. Additional information about the books
Each Baki book is ~130MB to ~180MB. Comparing that to other ebooks, that's the usual file size. Therefore, I do not think that the images (or rather the data of the images, since they are all encrypted) aren't actually available in the ebooks. It just seems, that they can't be correctly retrieved/decrypted.
The books, Baki and One-Punch Man (as reference), are all available to download in the EPUB 3 (Adobe DRM) format (see https://www.kobo.com/en/en/ebook/one-punch-man-vol-1 and https://www.kobo.com/en/en/ebook/baki-1).
3. What I've tried so far
To begin with, I tried to contact the Kobo support, since they are providing the books (spoiler: nothing worked). They told me to try different things. These are the following:
My next step was contacting the Adobe customer support. But since ADE is free, the customer support can't support me with my problem and forwarded me to this forum, where I'm presenting my issue right now.
I also tried, naive as I was, to look into each .epub file itself. But since the books are DRM protected, I couldn't really find anything useful, which might've given a clue to the issue. However, I found that each image file is up to ~1MB, again showing, that the image data is theoretically there.
4. What exactly do I want to achieve with this forum post
Well, blatantly put: I would like this issue to be resolved. However, I don't even know, whether this is a bug on Kobo or ADE. Therefore, I would like to know if someone already encountered this exact same issue and if yes, if they got it fixed. On the same note, if someone already bought the BAKI Volume books on Kobo, I would really appreciate it, if they could try downloading and opening the books in ADE just to clarify, if that problem is unique on my account or not (regarding the BAKI books).
5. Same/similar problems
Some users have already posted similar issues in this forum, e.g. https://community.adobe.com/t5/digital-editions-discussions/ebook-image-too-small-can-t-read/m-p/139.... They also provided a screenshot, which describes the exact same problem I have.
Another user posted the following: https://community.adobe.com/t5/digital-editions-discussions/the-images-are-too-small-to-see-or-read/.... Even if there isn't any more information provided, I think the user might've the same problem (although the post itself is now nearly a decade old - so it might be a completely different issue).
I dare to say, that this issue is definitely affecting multiple users and therefore finding a solution for it would also be beneficial to them.
TL:DR
I downloaded some ebooks (New Grappler Baki manga -> Volume books, pages are images) from Kobo. Opening them in Adobe Digital Edtitions results in the images (book pages) being rendered way too small and not readable (see attachments). Some users also experienced this issue. Can someone help me out?
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Did anyone respond to this?
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I have the same issue.