Can't display/convert azw3 file

[marinheiro]

Unsure which forum to put this in as it overlaps several (eg kindle file formats) but I'm guessing Calibre people may be the most knowledgeable :-)

So, I bought an azw3 file from Amazon: Benny the Blue Whale, by Andy Stanton. To be fair to Amazon, they warned me that it wouldn't work on my oldest Kindle, and it does work on my Kindle 7.

It does not work with Calibre: the Calibre viewer shows the azw3 file with the wrong layout, with some words missing, and other words misplaced and displaying on top of others, recognizably text but unreadable. I tried converting to epub, and the converter runs for a very long time but eventually does complete. The Calibre viewer displays the epub output even worse: no recognizable characters, just a few random patterns scattered across each page. Trying to read the epub in my Kobo is even worse: a long pause while it tries to load the file, then the Kobo returns to the library page.

I'm not so worried that I can't read this particular book, more curious about what is going on inside the azw3 file, whether this will be a general trend, and why it is happening.

Any ideas?

[Sirtel]

Probably the book is based on images, not text, so any conversion will result in a mess. No, this isn't and will not be a general trend. Some Kindle books have always been image-based.

[JSWolf]

I think it's a fixed layout eBook and in that case, forget trying to convert it to anything else. Also forget trying to read it outside of a supported Kindle or Kindle for PC.

[marinheiro]

Is there any way to do it manually? I was wondering whether it might be possible just to extract the text, even if it is unformatted, but don't know how to open an azw3 file - it doesn't seem to be a zip file like epubs are.

[Comfy.n]

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...d.php?t=171529

[marinheiro]

That looks like a very useful tool. In this particular case, it unpacks a mobi8 directory which includes an epub; expand the epub, and I see that a large proportion of the letters in the text are placed absolutely, for no benefit I can see, but making any straight extraction of the raw text impossible.

Anyhow, that was interesting, but I don't think I will put any more time into this particular book - maybe I'll abandon it, maybe read it on my wife's Kindle sometime (don't have one of my own).

[DNSB]

That sounds like a fixed layout ePub. There are benefits for some book types such as the kids books for my grandchildren. For most FLO ePubs, the benefits are hard to notice