Purchased PDF e-books not searchable in ADE?

[Nathaniel Comfort]

Hi, all--

I have searched the forums and not found this question answered.

When I purchase an e-book (on Google Play), I can usually download either epub or pdf versions. PDF books are not searchable in Adobe Digital Editions. The same book is searchable when I download the epub version, and if I add another pdf to my ADE library, it is searchable. It's just the books purchased on Google Play.

The problem is, I just bought a book that I need for my research and it is only available in PDF--no epub. The book is searchable in Google Play. But I will need to read it at times when I do not have wifi access (plus, having books all over the place wreaks havoc with my note-taking workflow).

Is this a known problem? How could a pdf not be fully featured in an *Adobe* product?

Solutions, workarounds, or sympathetic consolation welcome (in that order).

Using ADE 4.5.1 on a 2015 Airbook running Yosemite (10.10.5).

Thanks,

Nathaniel

[Nanaky]

The problem ist the format of the eBooks some ebook so can not searchable. To check if not digital edition the problem you can check if works when you used a file of this: Sample eBook Library | Adobe Digital Editions

[Hicks__Dan]

I ended up here after an extensive back-and-forth with Google Books about this same problem.  I've purchased 15-20 books on Google Books over the past few years, and they all have this problem.  It seems like the PDFs provided by Google Books contain only low-quality images.  These images don't contain any text data, which is why they can't be searched or annotated.  They're equivalent to a scanned, non-OCRed copy of the book. 

However, Google insists that "the book is not blurry" and so the problem must be with Digital Editions. 

At this point, the best approach may be to email the original publisher.  Explain that Google Books is selling low-quality versions of their books, and ask if there's any other way to purchase a proper PDF.  If you have access to a university library, you might check whether the library has access to an electronic version of the book that's fully searchable and so on.