[julesmck]

Hi, my sincere apologies if my question has been asked and answered before; I searched and could not find an exact description of my problem, which is being unable to access a Calibre library that was exported to Dropbox from an iPad Mini.

I'm a Calibre neophyte and here's my setup: my Calibre library is on a PC laptop, which is the 'ereader' I use to read my epubs in Calibre. I just inherited an iPad Mini and would like to read my Calibre library (the entire thing; not just a few select books) on the iPad. Is that possible?

I exported my library to Dropbox (Calibre > Export/import all Calibre data > Export all your Calibre data > Dropbox). However, when I log into Dropbox to see what got exported, no metadata.db file exists. The only things exported to the Dropbox folder are two files: part-0001.calibre-data and part-0002.calibre-data (each are 1 GB in size). Does anyone know why the metadata.db file wouldn't have been exported to Dropbox?

I installed Calibre Companion on the iPad and tried to point it to Dropbox but got an error message saying no database existed, so I manually copied the metadata.db file from the PC to Dropbox. That seemed to help, insofar as Calibre Companion started downloading something and a bunch of book titles and authors appeared, but when I tried to download one of the books, I got an error message saying "Error downloading book. Couldn't download the book file."

I thought PC (Calibre) > Cloud (Dropbox) > iPad (Calibre Companion) was the correct workflow but I'm obviously doing something wrong. I tried to do something similar on the iPhone with the same results, only there the book covers showed up. Still, when I clicked on Read to read one of the books, nothing happened. It's as if the book cover was just a .jpg and wasn't connected to the book itself, if that makes any sense.

Any ideas appreciated. Thank you very much for your time.