Ebook-viewer: fail when opening an ePub from Firefox

[Jellby]

I have recently upgraded both calibre and firefox, so I'm not sure where the problem is.

If I try to open an epub file from firefox, by clicking on a link (any book in the MR library) and then selecting ebook-viewer as the application to open the file with, I get this error:

calibre, version 2.28.0
ERROR: Could not open ebook: [Errno 5] Input/output error

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "site-packages/calibre/gui2/viewer/main.py", line 37, in run
  File "threading.py", line 763, in run
  File "site-packages/calibre/ebooks/oeb/iterator/book.py", line 100, in __enter__
  File "site-packages/calibre/customize/conversion.py", line 241, in __call__
  File "site-packages/calibre/ebooks/conversion/plugins/epub_input.py", line 228, in convert
  File "site-packages/calibre/ebooks/conversion/plugins/epub_input.py", line 105, in rationalize_cover
  File "site-packages/calibre/utils/logging.py", line 162, in __call__
  File "site-packages/calibre/utils/logging.py", line 154, in prints
  File "site-packages/calibre/utils/logging.py", line 45, in prints
  File "site-packages/calibre/__init__.py", line 227, in prints
IOError: [Errno 5] Input/output error

If I save the file instead, then I can open it with no problem. Also, this worked fine before the mentioned upgrades, and it works with other file types.

[eschwartz]

Works fine for me, on linux.

[Glorfindel]

Sounds like a problem with ff. Are you selecting 'download' and then opening it from Firefox, or selecting 'open' and letting firefox do its thing?

[theducks]

FF has 2 EPUB Options: Application Types, you might reset them to Ask

I just had Calibre Viewer open https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...d.php?t=181085

[eschwartz]

FF has no options by default, it derives them from the OS associations. (Or not, as the case may be. They don't seem to have heard of freedesktop.org which means linux FF-open-with is a godawful mess.)

[BetterRed]

@Jellby - I use a gadget called Flashgot, when I click on a book here I get this



The top option will open book in calibre-veiwer because that's my Windows default for EPUBS. I have this in Options :



A while back I had lots of problems with document downloads in firefox (pdf, epub, doc, xls etc) - so much so that I used chrome to do those downloads for while. I can't recall if it was resolved by: creating a fresh profile, reinstalling firefox, or reinstalling windows (because I got an SSD).

I'm using Win 7 Pro fully up to date, Firefox 38.0.1, and calibre 2.28 [64 bit]

BR

I use Flashgot because it offers the three pathways you see, importantly to Free (standing) Download Manager, I use it to download chunky things like software, iso's etc - then I can crash/trash the browser without interrupting the downloads.

[kovidgoyal]

That indicates that firefox is not providing a working stdout/stderr to the process it launches. All the calibre gui tools require working stdout/stderr. You can pass the --detach argument to them to have them auto-redirect to /dev/null

So use

ebook-viewer --detach file.epub

Presumably, firefox simply passes the file handles it gets to its child processes, so your real question is why does firefox not have working stdout itself.

[Jellby]

Originally Posted by eschwartz

Works fine for me, on linux.

Linux here too. Kubuntu 14.04. Firefox 38.0

Originally Posted by Glorfindel

Sounds like a problem with ff. Are you selecting 'download' and then opening it from Firefox, or selecting 'open' and letting firefox do its thing?

I select "open", with a hand-picked program (it defaults to calibre, I have to search for /usr/bin/ebook-viewer, it usually sticks, but sometimes it defaults back to calibre, which is another annoyance).

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

So use

ebook-viewer --detach file.epub

If I only knew how... With this damned firefox I don't see a way to specify the command line, I can't even find what the default for epub is, unless I know it's called "documento de libro electrónico".

so your real question is why does firefox not have working stdout itself.

Ah... I may have an idea for that... but I have to restart firefox (which I had already done before), so I'll post this and come back.

I'm back, and it's fixed. So, it turns out I had started firefox from a terminal (to debug some other problem), but had closed the terminal. Since then, I had restarted firefox several times, but always from firefox itself (disabling/enabling some plugin and clicking on restart now), so it seems firefox remained in a no-valid-stdout state. Now I have closed it and opened it again from the desktop icon, and opening books works fine.

Now the question(s): Why did it work with an AZW3 file? And could the ebook-viewer application switch to "detached" mode automatically if no stdout is found, so that this doesn't happen again?

[kovidgoyal]

It will work until it tries to write enough to stdout to overflow the buffer. And there is no reliable way to detect "no stdout".

[eschwartz]

for Firefox bug 296443 (a/k/a freedesktop specs? what are those?). Maybe when this is fixed so FF actually sees filetype associations, it will use the .desktop file complete with command-line parameters.

Or try mucking around with the FF profile. I think Open With is specified in mimetypes.rdf