Glo Kobo Glo Firmware Requests

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by dmon65

I had just added Ender's Game to mine for my eldest son to read, side loaded onto a sd card. Once I plugged it back in I lost the other four books I had just added. After editing the titles manually I reinserted the card and all five books showed up.

Now, seeing that others are not having issues with apostrophes maybe I was just lucky enough to have an issue with it reading the card instead! I'll continue paying with it and see. Thanks for the quick responds though!

The Kobo devices can be fussy about epubs and reject some that other devices read OK. If this happens when you add several books, any that should have been processed and added to the devices library after this book, are ignored. I suspect that is what happened.

But, and this just occurred to me, it might have been the apostrophe. If it was a single quote from the keyboard, it should be OK. But if it was a "real" apostrophe, it might cause problems. I think calibre would escape it in the file name, but the device could have a problem reading the metadata. Actually...

I just checked my copy of Ender's Game. The apostrophe isn't a simple single quote. Calibre changed this when writing the file. My Touch had no issues with it and there is a nice curly quote in the library list.

All that say the apostrophe should be OK so maybe there is some other problem with the book.

[dmon65]

Originally Posted by davidfor

The Kobo devices can be fussy about epubs and reject some that other devices read OK. If this happens when you add several books, any that should have been processed and added to the devices library after this book, are ignored. I suspect that is what happened.

But, and this just occurred to me, it might have been the apostrophe. If it was a single quote from the keyboard, it should be OK. But if it was a "real" apostrophe, it might cause problems. I think calibre would escape it in the file name, but the device could have a problem reading the metadata. Actually...

I just checked my copy of Ender's Game. The apostrophe isn't a simple single quote. Calibre changed this when writing the file. My Touch had no issues with it and there is a nice curly quote in the library list.

All that say the apostrophe should be OK so maybe there is some other problem with the book.

Thanks again for the info!

I think it must have been a cavalcade of coincidences. After manually modifying the name and having things work I just assumed... I know better than that.

I'll be checking this out by putting the apostrophe's back and seeing what happens now. More to come.

Scratch the firmware request for the apostrophe fix.

[0x55]

Originally Posted by davidfor

How did you modify the metadata in books that pushed them back onto the home screen? Was this actually a delete followed by a putting the updated book onto the device?

Good question, and I think I see where you're headed, but I don' have a helpful answer.

There were two new books via sync, and I believe four or five metadata changes. For the changes, two were attempts to edit device-side files, the others were epubs that were removed from the device and re-sent (reconversions for CSS tweaks).

I'll pay more attention next time, but of course removing and re-sending isn't a metadata tweak, it's a new file.

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by 0x55

Good question, and I think I see where you're headed, but I don' have a helpful answer.

Actually, it was a leading question because there isn't a way to do it. Except...

There were two new books via sync, and I believe four or five metadata changes. For the changes, two were attempts to edit device-side files, the others were epubs that were removed from the device and re-sent (reconversions for CSS tweaks).

I'll pay more attention next time, but of course removing and re-sending isn't a metadata tweak, it's a new file.

That's right. But, the other thing that could happen is to change the author or title, or any other field that is used in the save template. In that case, calibre will write a new file to the device and the device will have two copies of the same book. The second one will appear on the home screen of the device.

[0x55]

Originally Posted by davidfor

...The second one will appear on the home screen of the device.

Yeah, I discovered that but hadn't realized what was going on due to thrashing about with so many different uploads, metadata edits, conversions, re-re-re-conversions, and explode-tweak-rebuild operations.

So the library is sporting a handful of duplicates with "The Title" and "Title, The." Took me a bit to notice, but that's probably what I was (ignorantly) doing while thinking I was editing on the card. In fact now that I look closely (or more accurately, now that I pay attention to what I'm doing), a little widening reveals a "2 books" notation in the On Device column.

I'm moving 300+ files from a Nook, and in trying to clean up the haphazard mess I've made a different haphazard mess. But Calibre's a sweet tool and this site is a terrific resource. Now to the Calibre forum to research automatic CSS filtering...

At any rate, I second Markino's request: Newly added but unopened books shouldn't bump current reads off the home screen.

And to tack on a minor UI request: Move the Extras button to the panel that comes up before Settings (the one with date, battery status, sync, etc). The extras aren't really a setting and there's room to un-bury them a bit.

[markino]

Originally Posted by davidfor

Was this actually a delete followed by a putting the updated book onto the device?

Good point. In my case it may well have been, as I was editing shelves, and I seem to remember finding that it wouldn't work properly unless I removed the original books from the Glo before adding them back with altered shelf info.

But whatever triggers this behaviour, it seems that everyone agrees that it is undesirable to have the current read booted off the Home screen.

[markino]

Originally Posted by davidfor

I just checked my copy of Ender's Game.

How weird that you should use the same book to check this as I did.

Anyway, no apostrophe problems with it here either...

[markino]

Originally Posted by 0x55

Move the Extras button to the panel that comes up before Settings (the one with date, battery status, sync, etc).

I would probably second this - although I think Kobo deliberately buried the Extras to the Settings menu to support their assertion that these are unsupported features.

I'd like to throw in a related suggestion for discussion, one for which some of the coding work might already have been done:

I was reading something last night about the Kobo app (I think for iOS) - apparently if you touch on a word, as well as bringing up the dictionary entry the app will also bring up top search responses from Wikipedia and Google.

I can think of situations where this might be useful, and it wouldn't affect the reading experience. If Wifi is turned off, there could just be a button instead which would both turn on Wifi and do the search.

A given search entry could then be displayed text-only in the reader itself (using it's HTML support) rather than the user hanging about while the browser loads.

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by markino

How weird that you should use the same book to check this as I did.

No, it was deliberate. I needed a book with an apostrophe in the title and it happened to have a fancy apostrophe. And it is a very good book.

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by markino

Good point. In my case it may well have been, as I was editing shelves, and I seem to remember finding that it wouldn't work properly unless I removed the original books from the Glo before adding them back with altered shelf info.

What do you have "metadata management" set to? If this is automatic, the shelving is done when the device is connected to calibre and when you send a book. If it is manual, it is only done when you send a book.

But whatever triggers this behaviour, it seems that everyone agrees that it is undesirable to have the current read booted off the Home screen.

The problem for that is that I have several books in progress at the moment. Which one should be kept on the home screen when I add new books?

[jackie_w]

The Sony models' Home screen works similar to Kobo re: currently reading vs new books with the exception that the very latest currently read book always stays in place - in Kobo terms - the book with the biggest image. This might be an acceptable compromise.

[markino]

Originally Posted by davidfor

No, it was deliberate.

Even more amazing then, that you managed to do this deliberately, knowing I was also doing the same thing ten thousand miles away.

Agree that it's a very good book, though (although I think that applies to most of Card's books).

[thp1017]

Originally Posted by 0x55

However a separate "What's New" category, maybe as a Library option, would be a useful feature. It could even use the same most-recent-largest heirarchy and display the five newest books.

What I actually find hilarious about all of this is that the original Kobo (and I assume Kobo Wifi) firmware did this, and to this day I'm baffled as to why they got rid of it.

The original devices had a 'Now Reading' type shortlist, which contained all open books, sorted in based on most recently opened, *followed* by the list of books you added when you last synced the device, in descending order... or at least I think that it how the list was sorted, but at least content wise I'm sure. If you synced the device again, and some of the books you had added the previous time were never opened or read, they'd disappear off the list.

I'd definitely love to see this come back, maybe as a special shelf like the shortlist. Or a 'newly added' shortlist, and don't update the carousel? Or an 'Open Books' shortlist?

[markino]

Originally Posted by davidfor

What do you have "metadata management" set to? If this is automatic, the shelving is done when the device is connected to calibre and when you send a book. If it is manual, it is only done when you send a book.

Auto, but the books had already been sent to the Glo before I started sorting out shelves. If there is much more to this issue, I wonder if the discussion should be moved to it's own thread as this thread is in danger of becoming about Calibre?

Originally Posted by davidfor

The problem for that is that I have several books in progress at the moment. Which one should be kept on the home screen when I add new books?

In my opinion, all of them (or as many as possible). I'd rather have a link on the Home page to recently added titles than replace anything on the Home screen with recent additions.

[markino]

Originally Posted by thp1017

I'd definitely love to see this come back, maybe as a special shelf like the shortlist. Or a 'newly added' shortlist, and don't update the carousel? Or an 'Open Books' shortlist?

Yes, I agree that we should turn back time! What possessed Kobo to switch from that system, which sounds just about right, to this one, which seems counterintuitive to most people?