[davidfor]

Originally Posted by paulvro

Thank you very much for this information Davidfor. About the first part: I do always properly the "Safely remove hardware and Eject Media" procedure so I doubt if that could be the cause. What did happen, and perhaps that plays a role, is the fact that when I tried to refuel the batteries and got the "connect" option I also saw no evidence at all that the Reader was actually charging so I went to another electrical socket in the room to try again. I had the distinct memory that at the first time I charged the battery it did show the percentage of power that was left in the Reader. This time, after looking a lot for it I relaized that I needed to tick the little worm on the top right to get that information. But that aside.

As I said, the only way I know to corrupt the database is a badly timed eject. There has to be other reasons. One possibility is a crash while writing the database. But, there is no way for me to prove this.

Given the fact that my wife has been using the Reader without any problems at all for about 10 days since I worked on it so succesfully with Calibre also seems to indicate that this was something that went radically wrong in the charging procedure.

If you haven't powered the device off and hence forced a reread of the database in those 10 days, there is no way to know when it happened. Once the database is read and the memory structures created, the device can keep going. It just can't save the changes in the database properly.

Could you please tell me how to sign in and out of the Kobo account?

In the setting, the top option is "Accounts". In that, the various accounts are displayed. Select the "Sign out" that is next to your Kobo account.

And please keep in mind, I do NOT have the little home symbol that one normally sees at the left top of the screen available to me.

At the other hand, I am now being confronted with an entirely different screen than I am used to. Left top there is now the word Home in Italics, and when I select it I get a long list (Home, My books, My collections, My articles, Browse, Recommended, Kobo Plus, Wishlist, Activity, Settings, Help) I do remember someone's response that he had a different home screen and perhaps even mentioning that mine was an older version of it.

Which means the device has updated to newer firmware with the new home screen and some other changes to the interface. Now, instead of the home button that returns you to the home screen, there are three lines that when tapped display a menu. This has all the navigation options on it that previously were split between the items at the bottom of the home screen and the menu that was accessed by the top right corner menu icon.

The firmware is now probably version 4.4.9349.

Can it be that somehow the Reader revised it's own software? Because now that aspect seems to work again while the only thing I did was attach it to my computer to check what's wrong with it. I didn't make any alterations but they seem to have been made....

Yes, it can and does. Whenever the device syncs to the Kobo server it looks for an update. If there is one, it downloads it and installs it. If this happens as part of the daily automatic sync (which can be turned off in the settings) the update will be installed and the device restarted. This restart is when the database was reread and the books recently added and status changes disappeared.

If the update is downloaded when you are using the device, you will usually be prompted to install it. At that time, you can postpone the update and it will be installed the next time the device is restarted or connected and disconnected from a PC. The connection and disconnection from the charger might have triggered this.

PS: after safely removing the Reader from my computer and bringing it back to my wife, of course the first thing that showed was the entirely different home screen from what it was before. But more importantly, the Reader now does show the proper books that were on it before the malheur took place!!! One BIG difference: all books have the indicator "unread" while my wife had read several of them and was in the middle of reading a fourth book. So that information (not important but worth noticing) seems to have been lost permanently.

After connecting and disconnecting, the device did the usual processing of any book not known (either in the database or memory structures). Hence all those books that had disappeared were processed and you could see them. And their reading status was set to unread because as far as the device was concerned, they are new books.

I just saw an episode of the series "Catweazle" that was shown in memory of Geoffrey Bayldon who died a little over 2 weeks ago. Perhaps you'll understand that somehow I do get some similar feelings to the main character of this series when looking at our Reader.... ;-)

I was never a fan, but I remember the show and his reactions.

What I would suggest is playing with the device. Tap things and see what happens. And see what a swipe, or a long press on something does. There is very little you can do to damage anything, and nearly all those actions will show a confirmation prompt. You can look at an old post of mine about the UI standards used to see what things might react. That does need to be updated as it doesn't include the three dots or three lines that are used for menus. And the tabbed layout for some of the list screens.