Lost my 100 free books Kobo Original N416

[Coffeestar]

Hi all,

I could use a little help here. I bought a Kobo Original N416 from a thrift store and while I was fooling around with it connected to my computer, I accidentally deleted the pre-loaded books. I've tried factory resetting, copying from two Kobo WiFis we have (N647B for both, I believe) and nothing works. I did try to download free versions from the Kobo Store, but it bloats my book list too much because I can't filter them out like you can with the preloaded books.

Does anyone have either an image of an original Kobo N416 or something that would allow me to restore the pre-loaded 100 classic free books?

Thanks in advance for any help,


Sarah

[Calenorn]

Originally Posted by Coffeestar

Hi all,

I could use a little help here. I bought a Kobo Original N416 from a thrift store and while I was fooling around with it connected to my computer, I accidentally deleted the pre-loaded books. I've tried factory resetting, copying from two Kobo WiFis we have (N647B for both, I believe) and nothing works. I did try to download free versions from the Kobo Store, but it bloats my book list too much because I can't filter them out like you can with the preloaded books.

Does anyone have either an image of an original Kobo N416 or something that would allow me to restore the pre-loaded 100 classic free books?

Thanks in advance for any help,


Sarah

I bet many of them are available for free download right here on MR. Perhaps ALL of them.

[khalleron]

They're all public domain. You can download them for free from a number of places. Here, ManyBooks.com, Project Gutenberg, Google books, etc.

It's not like you lost something that has any monetary value. Just download the ones you would actually want to read.

This probably wasn't one of them, but you should read it anyway.

[Cootey]

All these points are true, but the OP is looking for a bundle of books to download. Individually downloading 100 books tskes a great deal of time. I’d be interested in that bundle, too, to be honest.


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[Cootey]

Originally Posted by Coffeestar

Hi all…

Does anyone have either an image of an original Kobo N416 or something that would allow me to restore the pre-loaded 100 classic free books?

Thanks in advance for any help,


Sarah

Hey, Sarah. Your request intrigued me, so I went on the hunt. Your first problem is that this bundle was offered in 2010. I found mostly caustic comments online because the 100 free classics were in the public domain, but somebody did mention that there was a link to download the books. I haven’t found that yet, but in the meantime, I found this—a list of the 100 books in question on Kobo’s site from 2010 in the way back machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20100503...ee-ebooks.html

Update: I found an old forum post here (https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...d.php?t=254119) with helpful lists, and even a link to 50 of the books. (Use this working archive.org link instead: https://web.archive.org/web/20100329...ub-format.html)

At this point, I am ready to concede that there are an infinite amount of requests for a zip file of the 100 free books out there in the deep web, and there are lists of the books in question, but nobody put together a file of all of the books since they are available on Project Gutenberg.

~Dˢ



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[Quoth]

There are nearly 60,000 public domain/out of copyright/free ebooks that have been human proofed on gutenberg.org
The Canadian fadedcovers.com also seems to be human proofed. Nearly 5,000 decent quality public domain/out of copyright/free ebooks.
Archive.org (wayback machine) is the place of last resort. Very many Google and Microsoft scans to PDF with poor OCR (I can do better OCR) and no proof reading.
There are also quality public domain/out of copyright/free ebooks at many university websites and also sacred-texts.com
Some are in HTML only, but LibreOffice is free, paste and edit, save as docx and convert using calibre.

Amazingly I bought two real paper books in the local bookshop. The cost and time saving is slight, so I've stopped buying paper books in print on Amazon as my local bookshop will order anything in print. They will find it when I can't quite remember the title and author. I do also buy ebooks from Amazon and Smashwords.

I've seen bundles on ereaders and sold on Amazon that are POORER versions than on Gutenberg. There is a lot of public domain/out of copyright content that's simply scanned and OCRed with little or no proofing and sold on Amazon.

[Coffeestar]

So, just to clarify a bit on my intent. I have tried to download all 100 of the original books using my roommate's Kobo Wi-Fi. The only problem with that solution is that with the original package you can filter them out when you're briefing your library, so if I'm looking for a book I know I bought or side-loaded then I don't have to scroll through a massive library. I can also browse just the preloaded books to work my way through them like a bucket list.

I can't do either of those things with loading them individually.

That's the only problem.

Now, as for a zip of the files themselves, I have already done noisy of the groundwork for something like that and might be able to throw one together. I'll let you know if manage to get one put together as I also understand the newer models don't cover with the preloaded 100 anymore.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by Coffeestar

Now, as for a zip of the files themselves, I have already done noisy of the groundwork for something like that and might be able to throw one together. I'll let you know if manage to get one put together as I also understand the newer models don't cover with the preloaded 100 anymore.

At that time, having the preloaded books was great for advertising and remember unless you had a Blackberry, there was no network connectivity for the original Kobo. Now? Not so much. Unlike sideloaded or Kobo synced books (I'm going by memory here so may be wrong), those 100 free books were stored in the SQLite database and not as individual files.

[rtiangha]

Originally Posted by Coffeestar

So, just to clarify a bit on my intent. I have tried to download all 100 of the original books using my roommate's Kobo Wi-Fi. The only problem with that solution is that with the original package you can filter them out when you're briefing your library, so if I'm looking for a book I know I bought or side-loaded then I don't have to scroll through a massive library. I can also browse just the preloaded books to work my way through them like a bucket list.

I have a Glo HD so I never had the books preloaded, but if you're looking for ways to separate out those 100 books, you could create a Collection containing just those 100 books and that way, rather than going through your entire library, you could just call up the Collection and work through them that way. You can do that through Calibre or on the Kobo itself by adding each book to the collection one at a time.

Now, as for a zip of the files themselves, I have already done noisy of the groundwork for something like that and might be able to throw one together. I'll let you know if manage to get one put together as I also understand the newer models don't cover with the preloaded 100 anymore.

As someone helpfully posted the list, I did the same. But I did it a bit different; since it appears that the versions posted on MobileRead seem to have a bit more work added to them than the stock Gutenberg versions (ex. Better formatting, embedded fonts or even illustrations, etc.), I prioritized adding those copies to my library instead. Where a version on MobileRead didn't exist, I added a copy from the University of Adelaide's collection since I think they're the next best formatted. Where neither collection had the title, then I added the Gutenberg version (although I could have done the Kobo version instead, I suppose).

Anyway, I posted my work here, if anyone wants at it (I put the download source in the filename; if you prefer another version from a different source, you can easily sub it in). I think it should be fine to redistribute since it's all public domain stuff anyway.

[Coffeestar]

Yes, the Kobo Original, which is the one I was using, has no wireless connectivity unless I unbrick an old Blackberry. Unfortunately I don't think you can make collections on the old Kobos. I'm pretty sure the files were there, but with encrypted filenames. I think I've got the files from my roommate's Kobo Wi-Fi, but the SQLite database didn't work and I don't know SQLite to try to hack it back together.

If anyone has an old Kobo Original with an uncorrupted database, I'd love a copy of it along with a zip of the 100 files if you can find it.

[Nascarfan1972]

Coffeestar,

Your best bet might be to use https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...mage+kobo+n416 which is a thread about the N416 image and ask on there for help. Or failing that if you bought an old Kobo N467 wireless that also had 100 free books on it.