diff --git a/src/calibre/ebooks/oeb/base.py b/src/calibre/ebooks/oeb/base.py
index 632696b4ae..2e480a9941 100644
--- a/src/calibre/ebooks/oeb/base.py
+++ b/src/calibre/ebooks/oeb/base.py
@@ -787,6 +787,8 @@ class Manifest(object):
             # Convert to Unicode and normalize line endings
             data = self.oeb.decode(data)
             data = self.oeb.html_preprocessor(data)
+            # There could be null bytes in data if it had � entities in it
+            data = data.replace('\0', '')
 
             # Remove DOCTYPE declaration as it messes up parsing
             # In particular, it causes tostring to insert xmlns