Don’t Get Spooked by “Fakepath” Errors

SelfPublishing.com offers a professional and affordable option to have your printed book edition converted to the two most popular e-book formats. Once your conversion is completed, you’ll receive an ePub and a Mobi edition of your e-book. You can then go directly to Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other retailers to have your e-editions listed for sale.

As you are the publisher and you have your files, it’s best to do this yourself. I’d like to say this is child’s play, but the process involves computers, so … Actually, I’ve heard it’s not that hard to do. But there can be occasional hiccups and pitfalls.

I recently had a customer email me about a problem he was having uploading a file to the Barnes & Noble site.  Seems he was getting back a message that mentioned something about a “Fakepath.” Because I don’t normally upload customer files to the various e-book sites, I had never come across this problem. It only took a little research, however, to find out exactly what the problem was and how to fix it. It all had to do with HTML5 and how it protects peoples’ files.

You see, there’s a security feature with HTML5 that hides the actual path of a file being uploaded so that others can’t find it and replaces it with fakepath: a false or “fake path” that would lead someone off the trail to your file’s origin to some unknown and probably risky location. This is primarily a problem with the newer browsers like Internet Explorer 8 and 9 which have implemented some HTML 5 code.  It’s a fairly easy fix.

To eliminate the problem, open the Control Panel, select Network and Internet, then Internet Options. At that point, select the Security tab the hit the Sites button and add the upload site to the list of trusted sites. Once this is done, you should be able to upload your files without any problems.

If you ever have any issues with your e-book files, send us an email explaining the problem. More often than not, we can remedy the situation and save you hours if not days of grief trying to get your files to work properly. This is another example of the kind of customer service you can expect from SelfPublishing.com.

Ed Matte

Having majored in Graphic Arts at RIT in the late sixties, Ed Matte has been involved in printing for nearly forty years. Working with top ad agencies, his experience as a high end scanner operator and prepress technician has spanned the commercial printing, book printing, packaging, corrugated and large format printing industries. As Director of the Prepress and Professional special interest group for the Boston Computer Society, he has taught a prepress course for designers at Mass Art and held numerous seminars on solving print related issues at both Montserrat College of Art and MIT. Always looking to future technological advances, he is currently involved with Self Publishing and the intricacies of Ebook conversion. With his experience in scanning and color, he also currently specializes in photo restoration and repair. E-mail Ed at edmatte@msn.com.

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