Texts in EPUB book are not flowable

It seems to me that I am the only one getting this kind of problem because I searched for the same problem over internet but I couldn’t get perfect results yet. My friend gave me some epub formatted ebooks which are made using a scanner. He scanned some books and converted it to epub format. They are not copyrighted and so anyone can download it freely. I don’t know how he converted but the problem is the text in it is not flowable. When I read it on sony 650 or PRS-T1 reader, the text or words seem to be running out of the screen. Is there any way to solve this? I think that he converted it wrongly. I cannot ask him to do it again because he already converted nearly 60 books.

I really don’t have any idea about this right now and due to this it is very hard to suggest you without referring the epub code. It looks like a PDF content, perhaps saved as graphics but doesn’t look like a actually text. He just scanned books and saved every page as separate image or Graphic files and then converted It to epub format directly.

You have told that it is scanned text. I assume that it is an embedded as an image within the epub. If so, then I think that it would explain something. By just scanning the text or content, you can make a reflowable text. You will at least need a OCR to convert images (texts inside it) into a real text file and then it can be converted to epub. So without seeing that file it would be much difficult to tell you what is wrong in this. Luckily, if epubs contain text, I would rather suggest you to convert it to.txt files using caliber. After that you can do a mass search to remove or add carriage returns. I think it is a only way to make the content reflowable,

Epubs are reflowable but PDFs are not but some PDFs can be *created* to reflow but they will not be as effective as Epubs. I will not count for reflowable PDFs. Actually ODF is kind of wrapper for different sort of data. It could be text, Graphic image, vector image and so on. These contents cannot be intelligently reflowed due to bunch of dots. Present in them. If the file or data contain only a plain text, then it could be easily reflowable.

I think that you are having the problem with device itself. You are using Sony e-Readers and it could be its lack of capability or simply a firmware problem which cannot make or read the epub format a flowable. Check if there is a new firmware update for that. May be it could solve your problem. Otherwise you might need to looks into devices like Amazon Kindle and Nook since they are convenient for reading epub formats. These devices are capable to reflow the text to fit their (small) screens. Other than this a reader can have a option to adjust the size of the print which suits comfortable reading. Due to this the publisher cannot have any control over layout, and tables and diagrams