DRMless AZW3 sent to Kindle Paperwhite from Calibre shows as having a very small number of pages

Question

I bought Excession in AZW3, but the page numbers show up wrong on my Kindle Paperwhite when I load it from Calibre. The book shows as having only 4 pages.

The following did not help:

• Device > Configure this device > Check "Send page number information when sending books"
• Editing the file to remove NCX (there was none as far as I can tell)
• Editing the file to recreate the table of contents.

A screenshot of what I see on my Kindle:

Answer 1

The problem with this book in particular is that the person who created the AWZ3 file used <div> blocks for every paragraph instead of <p> blocks. Apparently the word-count plugin skips <div> text, so it only counts a few words in the Titles, etc.

I used Calibre to edit the book, as follows:

Tools > Transform HTML > Add rule

From there select "matches CSS Selector" and I filled in div.fmtx1. Then I selected "Change tag name" and set it to p. I made a second rule for div.ftmx as well. See screen shots:

Then I hit "OK". I also had to add a rule to the CSS to make the <p> tags render the same:

p {
  margin: 0;
  line-height: 1.3;
}

Then I saved the book, loaded it on the Kindle again, and the page count is fixed:

The exact steps above won't work for every book (if they're using something other than a div, or a different class name other than fmtx and fmtx1), but knowing that you need <p> tags to get the text counted correctly should get you most of the way there.