[sbaylor]

Originally Posted by slantybard

Hi sbaylor, I tried to use the latest cloud sync (thanks for the bulk sync - it's way better than syncing each book individually) and see that the sync is not working between my iphone and ipad. I suspect that this is because the hashes are different for each file (downloaded from OPDS content server at different times) as has been the issue before.

I think you guess is right. What appear as identical books on two devices may not be actually (bit-by-bit) identical, especially when you download them at different times from an OPDS source like Calibre Content Server. Have you looked at the following FAQ on our website? They also suggest a solution by changing some preference setting of Calibre.

• I've followed the instruction to sync, but it does not work. Why?
• I've downloaded the same book from Calibre to two devices. How can the two copies turn out to be different?

Do you think there will be an eventual way of dealing with this? Ie, allowing books to be downloaded via content server at different times with difference hashes but still being allowed to sync (maybe based on other metadata?).

As you know, two books with identical metadata (title, author, series, tags) and/or filenames are not necessarily identical. For example, there are many ebook editions of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (AAIW) by Lewis Carol, each with its own text/figure formatting styles. There is absolutely no guarantee that any given highlighted text range in the underlying HTML file in one edition is also valid in another edition. What's worse is that anyone can edit any book's metadata (in Calibre and/or MapleRead) to make it look like any other book, say, AAIW. We think relaxing the md5 hash check for MapleRead's definition of identical books is really opening a can of worms. If you can come up a robust solution without relying on hashes, I will be glad to consider it.

In the meanwhile, my recommendation for you is to disable Calibre's metadata writer plugins and then re-download the books as needed. You should then have a very smooth sync experience.

Thanks for your thoughts. I use this app every day and continue to think it is the best epub app out there.

Thank you for your compliment! Writing a positive review on the App Store will be much appreciated too.

* For those who do not (or do not have to) use calibre, if you import your books in another way, you shouldn't have to worry about the sync issues as discussed in this post.