Garbled text missing spaces after opening ebook on Calibre

[milady495]

Hi! I recently bought an ebook from Amazon (I know, bad idea, but I couldn't find it anywhere else) and after adding it to the Calibre library I opened the viewer and the text appeared all jumbled up, without spaces, some of it in a smaller font... Just a very messy format, very uncomfortable to read.

Some images to show the issue:

It also appears like it has some badly scanned images:

It was a book published March 2023, so I couldn't download it from Kindle for PC 1.17. I got it via the download option for transfering through USB (first time I ever do that).

My Calibre version is 5.38.0, DeDRM 10.0.3.

Did I do something wrong or is this some sort of issue that is being worked on?

Thank you for your amazing work with this plugin :)

[stillhope]

Hi: You have done nothing wrong.

This looks to be an example of one of the Amazon ebook scams - fake book. It started about 1.5 years ago and for often out of print, or hard to get titles. I must of reported over 100. Amazon is doing nothing to stop it. The scammer takes a scan book (typically available for free from internet archive) converts to EPUB, wraps it in kindle and publishes it on amazon.

So far for everyone I have reported, the meta data was incorrect e.g. not from original publisher. The only ones that have been removed so far of the 100 are those where I took the time to leave a bad quality review, and others who also got caught, did the same.

Suggest leave a review saying terrible copy and needs to be removed. Request a refund if you like.

[ElleKayEm]

Not a DRM issue. It wouldn't even open with calibre's ebook viewer if it had DRM.

[milady495]

Oh, thank you both for your answer, I was going crazy searching online and trying different things with my Calibre...

I read most books these days directly from Calibre so I didn't even think of trying it on the Kindle and seeing if the ebook itself was the problem. Hope this helps other people that come across this problem.