Best way to delete a lot of side loaded books

[HarleyB]

Although I've had my Touch since June last year I haven't really needed to delete books previously due to my need to do multiple resets with previous upgrades, storage errors and other issues.

Anyway I realise that I am probably jinxing things here but my Kobo been behaving lately and I've just upgraded without needing a reset.

So - now I have more than 300 books on my Kobo but now I'd like to replace about 200 of them...

I just deleted 5 using the delete function on the Kobo but seriously that's going to take me all night. I can't believe how slow it was.

I'm sure I must be missing something? Surely there's an easy way to remove my books without having to actually reset? BTW I side load using Calibre and never use the Desk top app except for upgrades.

How do others manage their Kobo collections?

[paulsalter]

I dont have the touch, but if it works the same way as the vox when connected to calibre

when the touch is connected and calibre is running, do you see a new column on the left labelled 'on device'
if so click the header to sort by this
highlight all books with a tick in this column (they should all be together after sorting)
right click and select remove from device

Alas, the Touch and Vox are very different.

I'm guessing that the fastest way to clean out that many books is to delete all of the files from the Touch (including the .kobo directory) then re-adding the books. That will ensure the database is clean and the covers are deleted. You will need to reregister, but you won't have to reinstall the updates.

The second fastest way is to switch Calibre to device mode, select the books you want to remove (use ctrl or shift to select more than one at a time), the tell Calibre to remove the books. This will probably be a bit slower since it sounds like you're removing more books than you want to keep. I also don't know if the Touch will automatically clean up the database or if Calibre removes the covers.

[taming]

Or, you could (on a Windows machine) go to the or sd card listing under My Computer and delete them like any other file. Safely disconnect and let it process the deletions.

[HarleyB]

Thanks for the suggestions. All sorted now.
Pretty obvious when I think about it but as I have had to do so many resets deleting multiple books just wasn't something I ever needed to do before.
I normally delete my library books as I go so that was the only way I knew.

Now I'm off to play with SHELVES!!

[filmo]

Easy way to delete books from KT requires a computer. Use USB cord to connect your reader to your computer. You can find files with books on KT and
SD card plugged into KT then delete any books not wanted.

If you have Calibre installed on your computer and run wizard setting Kobo Touch as your device and a Calibre file in documents. Plug USB cable from Kobo Touch to computer. When Calibre syncs with KT you will see list of books an KT and on SD card. Select any books not wanted using shift select or control select. Right mouse click brings up options including deleting from device or SD card, include delete from computer or transfer to Calibre library file on computer.

[Atilla]

Originally Posted by taming

Or, you could (on a Windows machine) go to the or sd card listing under My Computer and delete them like any other file. Safely disconnect and let it process the deletions.

Taming,
will the K.T. remove the B&W cover pages after we manually delete the books from the SD card?

[MacEachaidh]

Originally Posted by Atilla

Taming,
will the K.T. remove the B&W cover pages after we manually delete the books from the SD card?

I second Atilla's question.

In my relatively short time of owning a KT, I've been through a fair few books, and have always deleted the epub files with Windows Explorer, then "stopping" the connection, unplugging it and letting the KT process the changes.

But if I look in the .kobo/images folder on my KT, even allowing for five files per currently-loaded book, I seem to have quite a number of graphic files that shouldn't be there. Are these maybe covers from previously-loaded books that haven't been deleted properly by the KT?

Since I read somewhere on these threads that firmware 2.0.0 can recreate needed cover images on the fly, would it be a good thing to do to just delete all the image files and let the KT recreate them for just the books that are present, or is that not the way to resolve the question?

What's the best thing to do as an ongoing way to manage these image files?

[Danger]

Originally Posted by MacEachaidh

...But if I look in the .kobo/images folder on my KT, even allowing for five files per currently-loaded book, I seem to have quite a number of graphic files that shouldn't be there. Are these maybe covers from previously-loaded books that haven't been deleted properly by the KT?

Since I read somewhere on these threads that firmware 2.0.0 can recreate needed cover images on the fly, would it be a good thing to do to just delete all the image files and let the KT recreate them for just the books that are present, or is that not the way to resolve the question?

What's the best thing to do as an ongoing way to manage these image files?

NO the Kobo .17 firmware and previous ones to that do not remove the images when you delete a book. I believe it only removes the book entry from it's database.

Here is some info on it:
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...d.php?t=170236
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...ghlight=images

I have seen mentioned that the new 2.0 firmware does create it's images on the fly. I hope that's true.

[MacEachaidh]

G'day Danger,
Thanks for taking the time to reply!

OK, so I got brave and did a bit of experimenting. Backed up all the files in the .kobo/images folder to a folder on my PC, and then deleted every single one from my KT. Stopped the USB connection, unplugged ... and didn't even get a "processing" screen. I got my Home screen, at first with just placeholder rectangles for the recent books, and then about five seconds later the screen refreshed with the cover images. So those graphics had obviously been created anew by the KT.

I paged through my Library; each new page took roughly 3-4 seconds to display, and then it showed all the covers correctly, so again the files were newly created. Paging back through the Library again once the images had been created was near-instantaneous for each page, so I'm pretty sure the delay was only in drawing the image files each time.

Anyway, I'm happy. I now have far fewer files in my images folder, so I guess this is something that can be done as a spring-clean process every now and then. (Of course, the ideal would be if the KT cleaned up all traces of any books that have been deleted from its system.)

A couple of things I noticed:

1) The new graphics filenames aren't hashed the way the older ones were; they now have the book's title in their filename, making them somewhat easier to identify. (Mind you, these are sideloaded epubs, not kepubs, so the file name of the epub also reflects the book's title. Even so, under FW 1.9.17, these image files' names were hashed, so this seems to be a change in how they're handled by Kobo.)

2) Each cover image file generated by FW 2.0.0 is actually slightly smaller than the cover image generated from the same epub under FW 1.9.17, so there's a bit of space-saving to be had by regenerating them. Not huge amounts, but a bit.

So, all turned out well.

[Danger]

Well that certainly is good news.

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by Danger

NO the Kobo .17 firmware and previous ones to that do not remove the images when you delete a book. I believe it only removes the book entry from it's database.

I have to disagree with this statement. I don't think that I have ever found a leftover image when I have deleted books using the KT menus and the .17 firmware.

If you delete a sideloaded book using using calibre, it does leave one behind.