[compurandom]

Originally Posted by MacEachaidh

I've noticed the "updating" cycle often doesn't complete,

I'd guess this is a corrupted book or a database issue. From the rest of your description, I'd lean towards a database issue from resetting the device while hung. Maybe the first time it was a bad book or a mis-synchronized book or a huge cover.

I've had good luck repairing the database with sqlite3, as described elsewhere in this forum. That's a lot easier than a factory reset, and at the very least, sqlite3 can tell you if the database is damaged or not.

But even if sqlite3 does successfully repair the database, there can be metadata corruption left over, which won't hurt much, but might leave you with undeletable non-existent books and other strangeness. I've wondered how hard it would be to write something to scour the database of problems like that.

Originally Posted by MacEachaidh

[...] that pressing the Home button on the Touch or sliding the sleep slider on the Aura HD is enough to bring the device back to itself.

I've also found that occasionally it isn't hung, just the screen didn't update after it finished indexing the new books.

Originally Posted by MacEachaidh

As for updating with new copies of a book sideloaded over an older copy, I've never found that to work. The only thing that works imo is to delete the unwanted copy, reboot the device,

A good shortcut is to delete the book from within the device itself (long press on the book from the library or a collection and select delete). If you delete it that way, it deletes the metadata for the book from your library, and then side loading can be done without that extra reboot.

When you side load over top of a book that has already been indexed, the metadata from the old book (which includes TOC, book length, offset to pages, cover, and some other stuff) stays in the database, and all kinds of strange things happen when you try to read the new book, including hangs and crashes and inability to correctly jump to pages or the end of the book.