[Xen]

Originally Posted by davidfor

Xen: Based on what you have described, something is going wrong with your Kobo.

Yeah, that's what scares me, LOL!

All my Kobo ereaders remember the sort sequence across reboots if I use the library link at the bottom of the home screen. If I press the library tile in the home screen, the sort is change to "recent" and remembered from then on.

I just checked, and as of now, it is working. I don't have that "library" tile on the home screen, I got rid of that and several other useless tiles off the home page first thing. Of course, I had to do that all over again when the Kobo decided to restart itself from scratch this morning ... but I do use the link at the bottom. For now it seems to be working.

The "forced to login" is almost definitely because the internal database on the device was corrupt. This is used to store details of all the books on the device, the annotations, the shelves and lots of other things including the Kobo user. If you powered off and on and was prompted for a login, then the database was in a very bad way. Because of this, a new database was created and you were prompted to login. After that, it had to reprocess all the books on the device plus download a few books you purchased from Kobo.

OK, I see how that is working - although I think taking nearly an hour to build a DB of only about 170 books or so is an inordinately long amount of time ... It wouldn't have anything to download from Kobo because I have made no purchases from them, and don't intend to make any.

Neither of the above should happen. I haven't had to do a login for months except when I deliberately did something to trigger it.

The database corruption is a concern. Some people seem to see them a lot, some never. Unfortunately, we don't know what causes it. The only way we do know is not safely ejecting the device from the PC when using something that accesses the database on the device. This includes calibre and the Kobo desktop app. We have seen a few reports here where people have continuously had corrupt databases. It turned out to be a faulty device and they were able to exchange it. And everything worked fine afterwards.

So far it is behaving and some of the other weirdness (like not keeping my sort order) has not yet recurred. I will hope it was a one-time thing.

I did have it connected to Calibre, and used the Calibre control to eject the device. I checked and the device didn't show up in windows explorer as still attached - seemed to be gone - and I read like 2 books after that and fiddled with sudoku and the word game thing for awhile after that, all seemed copasetic. Shut it off - powered it down.

Then when I got up this morning it was showing the cover of my current book - which it hadn't been doing last night as I had shut that off in settings (to not display cover when off). Which is when I went into settings, to turn that off again, and that is when it logged itself out and made me start all over again.

As I and the others have said, you don't need the WiFi for normal operation. This is unless you want to buy books from Kobo and sync the status. That is very handy if you are using multiple devices to read. But, it isn't mandatory. As others have said, they do the setup and turn WiFi off. But, if you want to avoid that, you can update the database to have a fake id and skip the setup. The device will still work, and WiFi will still work, but it won't sync books or anything with Kobo. A search of this forum will find the instructions for doing this.

I'll try to find that. The only thing I've found so far requires installation of old firmware.

I don't need sync, I don't have anything in the Kobo store and don't intend to, and if I did, I'd download to the PC, put it in Calibre, and sideload it anyway.

The only thing I was thinking of getting were magazine subscriptions - and it appears they won't let you read those in e-ink anyway. So - I'll have to get those from Amazon after all. Unless there's a way to move the file off your android phone (I have ES File Manager), onto the PC, into Calibre, and then sideload it up to the Kobo - but I posted a question about that and no bites, so perhaps that isn't possible.

Thanks for the help and ESPECIALLY the explanations. It helps to know what its actually supposed to be doing and what might have gone wrong.