[davidfor]

Originally Posted by AJvK

I tried the plugin, mainly to see if I could get read status / Finished columns to work. Short version: I couldn't, at least not without introducing other problems.
Longer version: I probably got some settings wrong, because after configuring the plugin, it screwed up all my titles, and I got all sorts of weird syncing behaviour. I use the Kobo Extended driver, and have a plugboard to change titles to "Abbreviated series #1 - title", mainly because that's the only reliable way I've found to keep book in series displayed in the correct order (if anyone has an easier way, I'm all ears). After installing and configuring Kobo Utilities all titles were reverted to "Title", and the name of the series was displayed below. But more importantly (to me, at least) was that the order was screwed up.

That sounds like you used the metadata update option and chose the title as one of the options. This does a straight copy of the library values to the device database. The plugin doesn't use the plugboards when setting the title or author.

To resolve, I had to delete Kobo Utilities, and delete and re-add all affected books. But my Kobo still adds the series below the title, something it didn't do before (or I didn't notice).

The series display is a feature of the Kobo devices. If the series information is set in the device database, then it is displayed as a line in the library list. Personally, I like this feature and dropped the use of the plugboard to put the series info in the title a long time ago.

It also means you have the "Set series information" option selected in the device driver configuration. If this is option is set, when you connect a Kobo device, it checks the series information on the device and updates it if it doesn't match what is in the calibre library. This means that the next time you connect after sending a set of books to the device, the series information will be set.

What I also noticed during the re-adding was that certain books would get added to the wrong shelf (I have it set to either a shelf named after the series, or author if a book does not have a series) - in one particular case, I had John Scalzi's The Human Division (part of Old Man's War series) get added to the shelf for Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Series - and I cannot for the life of me figure out why.

I'd have to see the shelf configuration of the driver to tell what is happening. But, I suspect you are using a columns with template code to select the shelf from values in different columns. Though how it would mix those up, I don't know.

Also, after adding several book, I noticed that some previously added books would get deleted without warning - again, no clue as to why, I've lots of free space left. I closed and reopened calibre several times, and powered the Kobo off an on, which got everything working again, apart from the fact that series is still displayed below the title, but that's just slightly annoying. Oh well...

Books disappearing from the device shouldn't happen without some interaction from you. If you aren't deleting them via calibre or the devices menus, the only way I can think of this happening is if you not using the "send to device" option for resending a book to the device. If the book file has changed size, and you use the "Save to disk" to put updated copies of the book on the device or manually sideload the changed copies, the book will be completely removed the device when it is processed again. When doing a send to device, the driver updates the device database to prevent this from happening.