[davidfor]

Originally Posted by Joliet Jake

I bought my first Kobo in 2014. I have had Calibre since *at least* 2018 and probably before. I currently have Calibre 4.23 because I didn't want problems with Amazon.

When I first got a Kobo, I bought some KEPUBs and got some free from their site. However I don't know how to put those books on a "shelf". In fact, Calibre cannot "see" those books.

When a device is connected, there are two lists of books. One is the usual list of all books you have added to calibre. The other is the device list. This shows all books that calibre has found on the device. This should show all books that you have purchased from Kobo and either downloaded directly to the device, or used the Kobo desktop to sync to the device. In both lists there will be a green tick to indicate the book matches one you have in the other list.

I can use Kobo Desktop to put the books on the Kobo, and everything is fine other than the books all landing in one "shelf". The covers are fine. These KEPUBs tell you where you are in a chapter.

I'm not quite sure of the distinction there. Kobo devices tell you were you are in any book you are reading. Or are you on an older firmware that doesn't show chapter progress for epubs? It is always a good idea to mention the firmware version of the devices you use asking for help.

Recently I learned about the Obok plugin and installed it. It found all the books and converted them to EPUBs. All of them have covers, and if I attach my Kobo Calibre "confirms" they have covers (I can see them, and the covers are visible in the appropriate folder). The covers are actually in the book themselves, so I don't need to modify the files.

However the covers never appear on the Kobo itself. I just get large text words as the title (the appropriate title).

I don't know what you are doing here. You are using Obok to add the books downloaded using the Kobo desktop to your calibre library. Are you then using calibre to send the books to the device? If so, the device should get the covers. But, it isn't as simple as saying the covers are in the books. For epubs, Kobo renders the first page and uses that as the cover. If the first page does not have the cover image, but is the title page (text with the title and author and probably the publisher) or something else, that is what you will get. If something prevents the cover from being generated, you the cover will be shown as the title plus the format and two rectangles around this.

If you are actually sending kepubs to the device, then the image that is used for the cover is defined in the OPF. But, to be doing this, you would be using the user added KoboTouchExtended driver instead of the builtin KoboTouch driver. And this driver should be handling the cover correctly.

In addition, a 300 page book says it has 2000 pages (since the KEPUB to EPUB seems to make every single screen a page, but the text is perfectly clear unlike with a PDF).

How pages are counted depend on the book format. Epubs use the Adobe RMSDK method which is not per screen, but, can be fairly close depending on screen size and the font settings. Kepubs are per screen, so the page count depends on your font settings. If you need to use a large font, it will show a larger number of "pages".

Am I doing something wrong to lose those covers? Is there a way for Calibre to directly interact with KEPUBs, perhaps there's a way to tell the plugin not to convert the books? (Every one of those books is available in Calibre as EPUB only.)

Calibre automatically converts books to the format the device supports when you send it to the device. It does the conversion, adds it to the library and then sends the book to the device. Kobo supports epubs, so they should not be converted. But, if they are arriving on the device as kepubs, either you are using the KoboTouchExtended driver, which transforms the epub to kepub during the send (doesn't do a calibre conversion) or the epub format has been unselected in the KoboTouch driver configuration. Either of these means that you have made a change, either installed the KoboTouchExtended driver, or changed the configuration. The former is the most likely. If you want to use epubs, then you can remove the extended driver or reselect epub in the driver.

As to covers, as explained above, they should just work. I would need to see some sample books to get an idea of what is happening. But, the drivers do have options to send the covers to the device when sending the books. This means calibre generates the appropriate image files from the cover it has and puts them on the device so that the device does not generate them itself.

Note: even if I access the directory where Kobo Desktop stores downloaded KEPUBs, I cannot see them. I know they're there but they're hidden, and I've set my computer to not hide any files.

In Windows, the Kobo desktop stores the books in "\AppData\Local\Kobo\Kobo Desktop Edition\kepub" within your user profile directory. The file names look like random characters and they do not have an extension. On a MAC, it should be in a similar location.

You can add an extension to use these, but, it only works if the book has no DRM. The Obok plugin sorts this out.

Guidance elsewhere told me I'm not using the Kobo plugins correctly. I have them installed but use them just to transfer EPUBs from Calibre to Kobo.

That guidance is probably correct. But, what that guidance didn't tell you is that you do not need any extra plugins to use calibre with a Kobo device. They are fully supported with the base install of calibre. The plugins are needed to do other things, such as send books as kepubs. What you install depends on what you want to do beyond putting epubs on the device.