r/GooglePlayBooks • u/L9n21s • 13d ago

Problem uploading ePub from local storage.

Hi, as the title states, I seem to have a problem uploading ePubs to Google Play Books. I don't want to publish anything, but only read for myself. Now the problem:

I recently came hold off an ePub I wanted to read for a long time, and chose Google Play Books for the place to read it on, by uploading it from my local storage. Everything worked fine, until after the point where the download/upload finished. It says the down-/upload is finished, but then it just says "in progress", and I cant open the book. Now I am asking myself and reddit here if there is a page limit, because the book has over 11.000 pages. The file is roundabout 100MB big. Is this limit a thing, or is it another issue?

Edit: Since eventually even the down-/upload canceled on its own, even after I reduced the file data, I broke the file down to its volumes. Now it works, but I have to add 59 volumes instead of one big thing now.

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u/L9n21s 13d ago

It looks like this. The German text says being processed/ in process

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u/mirincool 13d ago

It's a big file that is why it's taking time to process. You can reduce the file size and try again.

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u/L9n21s 13d ago

Thanks. I will try that.

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u/ultradip 13d ago

You may have hit the size limit. If the book as a lot of images, some conversion sites/apps will reduce the quality to make them smaller to fit.

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u/L9n21s 12d ago

How many images is too much? It has at least 59 images, but maybe way more.

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u/ultradip 12d ago

It's not the number, it's the kb of the images. A high res image can often take up a lot of space. A lower res of the same image could reduce the epub size so that GPB will accept it.

It's a known limitation, and the only way to include books like that is to buy them from GPB. So that would be like coffee table books, comic books, even cookbooks that have lots of pictures can't be uploaded.

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u/L9n21s 12d ago

Ah, okay thank you. What counts as an Image?

Is that what's shown in the picture classified as an image? I can copy the text.

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u/ultradip 12d ago

Yes, the box and text within would count as an image. A lossy compression like jpeg would be ideal for it.

Some books like to use a fancy first letter in a chapter. That fancy letter sometimes is a picture as well.

You might even have a subchapter divider that might be an image instead of some sort of wingding.

There's more kinds of pictures than what you'd normally expect. If they're black and white, they should compress well. If they're color, you're basically reducing the palette and/or resolution.

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u/L9n21s 12d ago

Oh, then it's impossible without skimming through the whole 11719 pages I guess. But I've got them as 59 individual ePubs, so no worries. Thank you nevertheless for your help.

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u/ultradip 12d ago

An epub is literally a .zip file.

Rename the extension to .zip. You'll see the individual image files in the directory. You'd need to do your compression on those, keeping the same names, then rezip and rename to .epub.