A Fix for the Google Play Books EPUB Issue

Subscribers wishing to use the EPUB edition of the book on Google Play Books can log back into the Warescription site and download a fresh EPUB. A diligent subscriber made some recommendations that, in the end, gave me an EPUB that works with Play Books.

However, the Play Books Web interface has its own set of issues. If you try uploading through it, when the “Processing…” banner goes away, wait several minutes more. Then, refresh the page, and try opening the book. If you get an error, wait a while longer and try opening the book again.

It is entirely possible that this revised EPUB now will break other readers. If you encounter new problems with the EPUB on certain readers, please let me know.

For those of you interested in the details… I switched from .html files to .xhtml files in the EPUB contents, to better comply with the EPUB specifications and make epubcheck happy. That, in turn, caused Play Books to choke on a <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" /> tag that I had in the XHTML files. Removing the <meta> tag, and discovering that I had to wait well past the end of the “Processing…” period to see if it worked, cleared up the problem.