Thread: [GUI Plugin] Kobo Utilities
View Single Post
Old 10-22-2014, 08:41 AM   #674
davidfor
Grand Sorcerer
davidfor ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.davidfor ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.davidfor ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.davidfor ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.davidfor ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.davidfor ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.davidfor ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.davidfor ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.davidfor ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.davidfor ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.davidfor ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.
 
Posts: 24,905
Karma: 47303824
Join Date: Jul 2011
Location: Sydney, Australia
Device: Kobo:Touch,Glo, AuraH2O, GloHD,AuraONE, ClaraHD, Libra H2O; tolinoepos
Ok, I know what is going on.

Firstly, when looked at the database, it was as I expected. For most of the books, the ImageID is blank. The only ones that weren't blank where the purchased kepubs and the epubs. None of the sideloaded kepubs had ImageIds. That means that none of these would have covers and because the ImageId is missing, the uploads methods would also fail.

The reason the ImageId's are missing is because the covers are handled differently for kepubs than they are for epubs. For an epub, the cover is the first page. The device renders the first page and saves that as an image. For purchased kepubs, the cover comes from the server. But, for sideloaded kepubs, the cover is the image marked as the cover in the book.

The way the device finds the cover is by looking in the OPF file. For kepub, there should be an image in the manifest with the attribute 'properties="cover-image"'. If the no image has that attribute, the default cover is used and no ImageID is stored in the database. All purchased kepubs have the attribute. If you send an epub to the device using the KoboTouchExtended driver, it should add the attribute. But, it can only do this if it can find the cover image. The driver tries this in a couple of ways. Usually, it is successful, but occasionally, it isn't.

As none of your sideloaded kepubs have the attribute, I suspect you haven't used the extended driver to get them onto the device. Did you send the epubs and rename them? Or include ".kepub" in the save template in the driver? Either of these would cause the problem you are seeing.

As partial solution at this point is to install the extended driver and connect the device. The extended driver has a function to look for books with empty ImageIds and generate the expected id and update the database. After that, you should be able to use the utilities plugin to upload the missing covers.

After that, you need to decide how to send the books and what format to use.

Quote:
Originally Posted by srichard View Post
I used to transfer kepub using Kobo software and everything was fine. But I cannot anymore because of a problem on Kobo server side they are not fixing quickly. That is the main reason why I use Calibre for kepub now, the only problem is the cover (but I can ultimately live with that). I tried to convert to epub, but this way I miss the pop-up footnotes on the device (and for books with plenty of footnotes, it is terrible to navigate between text and book end, with hyperlink not working).
I'm not sure what you are doing. What problem do Kobo have with the server? Is some book not syncing to the device, but it is to the desktop app? Where are the kepubs coming from? The desktop app or from a conversion in calibre? Either of these should have the cover defined properly. If they don't, I'd like to see an example book so I can try an work out what is happening.
davidfor is offline