OCR in a book: Perfect in Google.Play - Poor in Adobe Digital Editions

Report · Apr 10, 2015

Hello to everyone.

I have a problem with this book (Google Play‌) I've bought at the Books section of Play.Market. Once I open it in Chrome, everything seems fine. When I tried to download it as PDF to have it on my PC (Win7), it gave me a DRM-protected *.acsm which I had downloaded and opened in ADE. But what I got is a PDF of inferior quality: some of the characters, both cyrillic and latin, were omitted, the others recognized poorly (н instead of п, ь instead of ы and so on). As you can imagine, the process of reading turns into 'guessing captcha' several times a page.

I've addressed Google for support, but they say nothing can be done on their part, however it's clear there is some issue with PDF that ADE downloads and the way it recognizes the text.

Has anyone faced the similiar problem? Is it solvable, or should I keep on reading this book putting in the efforts unintended by the author?

I'd like to see some support from Adobe as well.

Report · Jun 26, 2015

Yep, similar problems here. The PDFs downloaded from Google Play to ADE have the following issues (all nine PDFs purchased from Google Play):

Smaller PDF file sizes than what other non-Google sites list them (overdrive.com, ebookmall.com, etc.).
Lack of a table of contents within ADE for the PDF file, although it it just fine within the Google Play viewer within the browser.
Inability to highlight text within ADE. This is pretty much the consequence of converting all text to images in the PDF files.
Having color images on the edge of pages (for images that cross page boundaries) to be converted to black and white, effectively obliterating the image portion.

I reported this problem to Google Play over three weeks ago, but they claim they are still working the problem (sound familiar?!). My guess is they are applying their PDF converter to all publisher supplied PDF books, regardless of whether these are retail copies or not. I have zero faith that they will correct this issue as it would be widespread to their entire inventory of PDF files. This is not an ADE problem, unfortunately.

For the record, I re-purchased one of the PDF books from another source (omnilit,com), and the PDF files was exactly what I would have expected within ADE. I have also purchased six other PDF books from three non-Google sites in the past two weeks, and none of the PDF files exhibit any of the above issues.

Good luck in your efforts to get Google Play to correct these issues.