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Hi paulvro,

I suggest you start taking good notes about exactly what you do and what you see and start trying things out in a systematic way. The reason for this is I believe you do not yet have a sufficient mental schema or model of how the ebook-ereader-PC system fits together.

Here are some guiding principles for you (as opposed to the excellent detailed advice you have already received):

1 - Syncing versus sideloading.

Syncing usually refers to downloading books from an ereader vendors captive book store, and/or recording the bookmarks, notes, and last page read of books on the device or in the cloud bookshelf. You probably won't need to do this because you are trading around ebook files.

Sideload refers to putting books on the device, usually through USB transfer (but possibly through downloading over wifi), without using the vendor's store.

2 - Digital rights management (or DRM)

This is anti-theft technology built into books bought from some stores. The book is encrypted and can only be read on a device with the proper key to decode it. This code can often be broken if necessary, and the book decrypted for reading on any device.

However, if you are trading non-protected books this shouldn't be a problem for you.

3 - treat your ereader like a USB mass storage device.

By this, I mean don't think that you need to use Kobo's software or Adobe Digital Editions to transfer books to your device. The DRM key is embedded in those programs, but if you don't have DRMed books, you can use the Windows Explorer to drag books directly into the disk representing your ereader.

Contrast with Apple's iBooks where you can only add books to an iPad by importing them into the iBooks application on a Mac or purchasing in iTunes before syncing with the device.

If you do want to organize your books in a central library on your PC, most people here would suggest using Calibre instead of Kobo's desktop software or ADE. You will be able to get much better help as more people use Calibre, and many of the developers are regular posters here (including the founder/original developer). It also has much stronger organisational tools for use once you become an advanced user.

Calibre can take care of copying books to device for you.

4 - the many meanings of "sync"

I said above that sync means downloading books from the vendor's store, but the word can mean other things depending on context.

Sometimes, the act of sideloading is also called syncing. After all, copying books to your device from ADE or Kobo's software is essentially the same as copying books using Calibre or the Explorer.

After you disconnect your ereader from the PC, it scans through its filesystem looking for new books and updates its internal database recording information about the books. This is sometimes also called sync.

5 - ebook formats

The Kobo is good at reading many different formats of books (although I can't remember if you can read mobi books directly or whether you need to pass them through the Kobo desktop software for conversion) including epub, Kobo's kepub, rtf and pdf.

I would suggest that for your initial experiments you choose a single format (epub is likely the best) and stick with it until you are familiar with how everything works.

If you end up installing Calibre, it can do format conversions for you if needed.


I hope I didn't repeat too many things that you already know. Good luck!