[GeoffR]

Originally Posted by bookwurm70

While I have no objection to syncing with Kobo, since they are curently my main purchasing store (unless a book is cheaper or free at B&N). The problem is, most of my Kobo books are already in Calibre. If I side load them with the rest, will I end up with two copies of books in my Aura?

I read a lot of series, and want to take advantage of the series metadata from Calibre in the Aura, but will the Kobo downloaded ones display the series info?

If you download a Kobo book by sync and sideload the same book via Calibre then you will have two copies of the book on your device.

If you don't want the Kobo downloaded one you can either delete it, or archive it and set the option not to display archived books. Either way you will then only see the sideloaded book, but in the second case you still have access to the archived book from the device (if you deleteed the book you would need to go to the Kobo website to get access to it again).

If you don't want the sideloaded one you can delete that from the device. In that case Calibre will match the un-sideloaded(?) book in its records with the Kobo downloaded version on the device. Even though these are different versions of the same book, Calibre will see them as the same book (provided the title and author matches) and so you can edit the series information on the book in Caibre and Calibre will set that information on the book on the device.

I have a mixture of Kobo downloaded kepubs and sideloaded epubs on my Glo, usually I read the kepub but sometimes if I don't like the formatting I delete it and sideload a tweaked epub version in its place. I keep epub versions of all the books in Calibre, and when my Glo is connected Calibre shows all the books as present on the device and I can't on the face of it tell which have actually been sideloaded and which are just being matched with Kobo downloaded kepubs. I tag the Kobo books in Calibre in case I need to know that in the future.

So in short you can mix Kobo downloaded kepubs and sideloaded epubs on the device and still use Calibre to manage the series information, even if you have some books in a series as Kobo downloaded kepubs and others as sideloaded epubs.

Edit: When first setting up, the best way might be to first sync with Kobo to download all your Kobo books, then connect to Calibre and check that they all match the books in Calibre's records (occasionally there can be a spelling difference in title or author). Then it will be easy to just sideload the ones that do not have a Kobo downloaded version already on the device.