Download Problems! Please help!

[DMLyons]

This is going to be a bit long, but please bear with me. Most downloads work just fine. Occasionally, they don't, and I can't seem to find any rhyme or reason to why some don't. But...I've got one customer working with me to try to fix this. She's taken a bunch of screen shots for me, so I can see what she sees.

She tried to purchase Book A in .mobi. When she tried to press the download button, she didn't get the pane to save. Instead she was informed that she didn't have permission to access the file on this server, though the purchase shows (with file type) in her purchases, and there are no problems on the sale end. In addition, there was an error code below it that said a 404 error was encountered when trying to use an Error Document to handle the request. Now, mind you, the download manager shows all file types/names as green lighted, so it's not an error in the file name causing this. Additionally, she purchased the same title in PDF, and PDF worked fine, first shot, when Mobi wouldn't work, most times she tried it.

She went back in and (at my urging) tried to save the target as instead of pressing the button. The few times I've gotten the don't have permission error (yes, this sometimes happens to people who otherwise have no problems, which tells me it's not linked to OS or browser), that has worked for me...or reloading the page and then using the right click to save target as works. In her case, she clicks to save target as, and the pane to save does not open. She gets stuck at that point and cannot download.

She finally did get the Mobi to download, at one point, at which point, she encountered ANOTHER error. Namely, it wouldn't open on her Kindle. As a test, she tried to open it in Calibre, and she got a bunch of errors...and the book wouldn't open. I sent her the same copy I loaded on the download folder of the Zen Cart, and it opens fine in Calibre and on the Kindle. When she compared the two files (SUPPOSEDLY the same file) on Calibre, she noted that Calibre sees it as three subfiles for the one that opens (book, cover, and metadata...all bundled together in the .mobi file) and two much smaller subfiles (book and metadata...both smaller than the listing for the one that opens) for the one that doesn't open. Also, when viewing the list of files in Calibre pane, the one I sent her (the one that opens) shows all it's metadata, but the one that doesn't open has blank metadata.

This leads me to the conclusion that, in addition to not allowing customers to download the file, it's also SCRAMBLING or TRUNCATING the file loaded onto the download folder in Zen Cart somehow and for some reason.

Now, we weren't sure this was a Zen Cart issue the first day, but she's just encountered the SAME issues from another publisher using Zen Cart, which tells me it's definitely Zen Cart-related. Whatever this is, both the download problems and the file problems are repeatable. I believe all the errors we've seen so far were on Mobi and ePub files. PDF seems to go smoothly, as do other formats.

Does ANYONE have an idea what might be going wrong and how to fix this? If several formats won't download properly, I will never get the home site sales platform up and sustaining itself, and all my income will end up coming from third party distribution channels. HARDLY ideal.

[Ajeh]

Did you ever edit the .htaccess files in /pub and /download for the lines:

<FilesMatch ".*\.(zip|ZIP|gzip|pdf|PDF|mp3|MP3|swf|SWF|wma|WMA|wmv|WMV|wav|epub)$">

to include the .mobi extention?