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Originally Posted by lorikitty
Hello again MultiPie!
First, I've been using Calibre Companion for almost two years now, and joined the Beta per your suggestion shortly after I bought it. I rely on it so much, and love it to death (literally - it's loaded over 10k books on my phone and I'm still trying to kill it).
In that time, I started college, and bought a low-capacity Chromebook that supports the Play Store and has a touch screen interface (the Acer R11). Since I have less than 10GB available storage, and it's half-used by everything else I do with the Chromebook, I bought a high capacity micro SD card with the intent to keep it permanently inserted in the Chromebook. Right now the SD card is loaded with a copy of all the books my phone has, and the settings backup from my phone so I don't have to re-do all that work.
I've tried multiple ways to get Calibre Companion to work with the micro SD card, which the app does see, but it never writes to it. Further research on the matter indicates there's a way to set up the APIs to enable removable storage support, but it's up to the app developer to do that.
Since removable storage isn't the best way to use Calibre Companion, I understand why it's not implemented. Even so, for Chromebook users who use your app, it might be the only way we can have our libraries available while away from our home networks.
Is there any way you could make an exception to your removable storage stance?
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It is ChromeOS that is causing the problem, not CC. There are a zillion posts on the 'net about it.
This thread might help you make it work.
My bottom line: the SD card must be a mounted file system and CC must be able to get write permission via Android's Storage Access Framework. This has been tested on Android devices with SD cards and with OTG-mounted disks (thumb drives and real spinning disks) that show up in the SAF browser. (OTG mounting usually requires root). My understanding from the threads mentioned earlier is that the ChromeOS people are planning to add this functionality real-soon-now.
I am not going to try to implement something special for Chromebooks. The first problem is I don't have one to test with. Second: it isn't clear that I *can* do anything about it. Third: I don't see the payback, especially if I would need to maintain 2 different APKs.
One idea: if you put your entire calibre library (books and metadata.db) on the SD card then you can use CC's local cloud connection to retrieve books from that library. The connection needs read access, not read/write. You would have all your books available. You could copy a small subset of interest to CC's library in local memory. or copy the books one or two at a time relying on the local-cloud connection browser to search the library. This method works with mounted OTG drives that aren't visible in the SAF, which from your description is the behavior you are seeing.