MobileRead Forums - View Single Post - Force-updating books on a Kobo H2O from code

davidfor · 07-21-2019, 04:33 AM

What problem are you actually trying to achieve? What you say you are doing doesn't quite make sense for anything I can think of. Nothing I can think of would need you to remove the book from the calibre library.

As you mention updating online serials, I think your problem is that when you to send an updated copy of the book to the Kobo device, the ToC and metadata do not get updated. If that is the problem, there is something really simple you can do: Turn off the "Do not treat replacements as new books" option in the driver. This is on the second tab of both the KoboTouch and KoboTouchExtended drivers. For updating the metadata, there are options in the driver to do this each time the device is connected.

The reason for this is that when the Kobo device sees a new sideloaded book, it imports details from it to the internal database. These details include the metadata and the ToC. When a book is changed (based on file size), it deletes the book details from the internal database and imports it as a new book. But, this means you lose the reading status, annotations and collections.

The early firmware didn't do this. If you updated a book, it just accepted it. When this changed, I worked out how to prevent it and updated the KoboTouch driver (and hence the KoboTouchExtended driver) to handle resending a book this way. My logic was that if you were only making changes to things like spelling or styles, you didn't want to lose the reading status. And, if you made deeper changes you could delete the book first. That was the best of both worlds. But, due to several requests, I added the above option to the driver last year. That way people could chose which behaviour they want. The option is on by default as that is what the behaviour was before the option was added. I think turning off the option will do what you want.

For updating the book in calibre, I normally select the book in the list and drop the updated version in the details pane. That replaces the version in the library without changing the metadata. I'm pretty sure there is a way to do this using the command-line, but, I've never needed try.

07-21-2019, 04:33 AM	#2
davidfor Grand Sorcerer Posts: 24,905 Karma: 47303824 Join Date: Jul 2011 Location: Sydney, Australia Device: Kobo:Touch,Glo, AuraH2O, GloHD,AuraONE, ClaraHD, Libra H2O; tolinoepos	What problem are you actually trying to achieve? What you say you are doing doesn't quite make sense for anything I can think of. Nothing I can think of would need you to remove the book from the calibre library. As you mention updating online serials, I think your problem is that when you to send an updated copy of the book to the Kobo device, the ToC and metadata do not get updated. If that is the problem, there is something really simple you can do: Turn off the "Do not treat replacements as new books" option in the driver. This is on the second tab of both the KoboTouch and KoboTouchExtended drivers. For updating the metadata, there are options in the driver to do this each time the device is connected. The reason for this is that when the Kobo device sees a new sideloaded book, it imports details from it to the internal database. These details include the metadata and the ToC. When a book is changed (based on file size), it deletes the book details from the internal database and imports it as a new book. But, this means you lose the reading status, annotations and collections. The early firmware didn't do this. If you updated a book, it just accepted it. When this changed, I worked out how to prevent it and updated the KoboTouch driver (and hence the KoboTouchExtended driver) to handle resending a book this way. My logic was that if you were only making changes to things like spelling or styles, you didn't want to lose the reading status. And, if you made deeper changes you could delete the book first. That was the best of both worlds. But, due to several requests, I added the above option to the driver last year. That way people could chose which behaviour they want. The option is on by default as that is what the behaviour was before the option was added. I think turning off the option will do what you want. For updating the book in calibre, I normally select the book in the list and drop the updated version in the details pane. That replaces the version in the library without changing the metadata. I'm pretty sure there is a way to do this using the command-line, but, I've never needed try.