[davidfor]

Originally Posted by franklekens

I have a Kobo Forma, Calibre, and the KoboUtilities extension.
With these, I can copy the annotations/higlights of any books I sideloaded onto the device.
But the function is greyed out on books that were downloaded on the device via the Kobo shop directly.

How is the function greyed out? There is no code in the plugin to differentiate between sideloaded or downloaded books. And, the function is only disabled if there is no device connected that it can work with. It works here for getting annotations from purchased books (I just checked).

And books that i downloaded onto the device via the Kobo Plus subscription don't even show up in Calibre.

This the the first time that I have been told that Kobo Plus books are not shown in calibre. In one way, it isn't that surprising as the database entries of them are likely to be different to other purchased books. But, from memory, there was no difference for Overdrive library books, which is probably why I haven't asked anyone about them.

But, do you mean they do not show in the device list when the book is connected? If they do not, then the above is the situation and I need to update the driver in calibre to support them. And to be able to do that, I need to see the database from a device that has Kobo Plus books. I don't live in a country that has Kobo Plus, so cannot sign up for it myself (and am not really interested in it). If you or someone else who has a subscription can supply me with a copy of the database from their device, I can look at fixing this. The database is the file "KoboReader.sqlite" in the ".kobo" directory on the device. If you can upload it somewhere and PM me a link to it, plus the titles of some Kobo Plus books you have, I can look at it and update the driver.

Or do they show in the device list, but do not match to a book in your library? For this, you need to add the book to your calibre library by other methods. For a Kobo Plus book, I would suggest that you add an empty book and fill out the metadata. On the next connection, it should match to the book on the device. If it doesn't, you will need to do a manual match using the device list. I find that the most common reason for this is that the book have multiple authors.

To do this, right-click on the book in the list and select the option to match the book. Then search for and select the book in your calibre library. After you have done this for all unmatched books, right click on the device icon and select the "Update cached metadata on device" option. This updates a file that calibre maintains on the device that is used to assist with matching the book on the device to the library.

Also, this could be the problem for your purchased books. The Annotation plugin will only retrieve annotations from the device for books that match with books in the library.

So is it categorically impossible to copy all the annotations/highlights I made in either of these two categories of books onto a PC?

It is categorically possible to get annotations/highlights for purchased books. It will probably be possible for books from Kobo Plus.