diff --git a/DESCRIPTION b/DESCRIPTION
index 87b80644..083f6b5a 100644
--- a/DESCRIPTION
+++ b/DESCRIPTION
@@ -1,7 +1,7 @@
 Package: bookdown
 Type: Package
 Title: Authoring Books and Technical Documents with R Markdown
-Version: 0.38.1
+Version: 0.38.2
 Authors@R: c(
     person("Yihui", "Xie", role = c("aut", "cre"), email = "xie@yihui.name", comment = c(ORCID = "0000-0003-0645-5666")),
     person("Christophe", "Dervieux", , "cderv@posit.co", role = c("ctb"),
diff --git a/NEWS.md b/NEWS.md
index 4e611c79..247c6a16 100644
--- a/NEWS.md
+++ b/NEWS.md
@@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
 # CHANGES IN bookdown VERSION 0.39
 
-
+- Fixed a bug that `bs4_book()` errors on generating document description. The error occured when the beggining of the document is a very long sentence without spaces (> 197 characters), which typically happens in CJK languages (thanks, @atusy, #1463).
 
 # CHANGES IN bookdown VERSION 0.38
 
diff --git a/R/bs4_book.R b/R/bs4_book.R
index 9f9b1340..8b1170bf 100644
--- a/R/bs4_book.R
+++ b/R/bs4_book.R
@@ -596,7 +596,7 @@ tweak_metadata <- function(html, path) {
   if (nzchar(text)) {
     words <- unlist(strsplit(text, " "))
     no_char <- cumsum(unlist(lapply(words, function(x) {nchar(x) + 1})))
-    max_n <- max(which(no_char<= 197))
+    max_n <- max(which(no_char <= 197), 1)
     description_string <- paste(words[1: max_n], collapse = " ")
     if (max_n != length(words)) {
       description_string <- paste0(description_string, "...")