[corona]

I got rid of the 100 books, and everything else. (The "everything else" was books I purchased and checked out of the library; I put those back in at the end.)

So far anyway my Kobo doesn't seem like a brick. But really, I don't know what will happen to you and your Kobo if you try this.

The first thing I did was go to ADE and take everything I could off of the Kobo.

Then I backed up the Kobo's file system by copying it to someplace on my hard drive. I don't actually know if this would be effective if needed. Maybe it wouldn't work to just copy it all back to the Kobo. I didn't have to, so I don't know. I just copied everything in the Kobo -- using Windows Explorer -- onto the hard drive.

Everything else below I did right on the Kobo, with Windows Explorer and a Firefox add-on called "SQLite Manager." The Kobo came up on my computer as drive G.

I had some PDFs in the G:\ directory. I deleted those.

I opened the G:\books file with Notepad and deleted everything in the file. It's just a text file; I think this was some values of the variable "contentID" in the database content table -- maybe for the freebee books? Anyway. I saved the now-empty file.

I went to G:\.kobo\images folder and deleted all the files (this is the cover images).

I used the SQLite Manager to open the database and delete all of the entries (but not the table structure!) of the tables: "content", "shortcover_page", and "volume_shortcovers". This took a few minutes, definitely. (I did it with simple SQLite statements; line-by-line manually would take forever.)

In the "user" table I deleted the user "Nickel Bundle" (which left just me as a user). "Nickel Bundle" appears at various places, and I assume it pertains to the 100 freebees.

I didn't fool around with the "DbVersion" table.

Added step: compact the database ("vacuum" command in SQLite parlance). This takes a while.

I closed the database, ejected and unplugged the Kobo. Seemed okay.

I plugged it back in again and added the books I purchased from Kobo store, and checked-out books in the ADE. As usual, I had to go into the Kobo and move the checked-out PDF books up to the root (G:\) directory so they would appear at all (as documents, not books).

Interesting facts:
-it seems to have worked just fine.
-the G:\books file remains empty, but that doesn't seem to have any effect.
-at some point while I was fooling around with the db (I didn't notice it when it happened) the red battery-ok light came on. I haven't seen it for ten days!