[geek1011]

Originally Posted by davidfor

But, in this very thread, you admitted you didn't know what the KoboTouchExtended driver did. You made a statement about what it did which was very wrong and you were corrected.

And, the fact you don't know what it does is a bit strange. To paraphrase what you state here, I've answered the question of what the KoboTouchExtended driver does way too many times. And in at least one discussion with you (the thread you opened about how to create the kepubify plugin).

I can't think of a way for the KoboTouchExtended driver to stall. The conversion could, but you would need a really bad book.

The latter is an explicit decision to support books that are reasonably error free when being send to the device. If there are errors with books that the device can handle fine, if they are reported, they will probably be fixed. And if you have an example of the former, I would be interested in seeing it.

But, I will vehemently disagree with the "less intrusive". We have discussed the fact that kepubify does things that are not documented. And how is "removes leftover Adobe DRM tags, cleans up MS Word tags, and cleans up the html" less intrusive? Especially when there is no option to turn this off. The KoboTouchExtended driver explicitly only does what is needed to have the book as a kepub on the device. Or are you thinking of a conversion with this statement?


Yes, if you are using calibre, then seriesmeta is unneeded.

But, maybe all my comments are pointless as maybe you are referring to the Kepub Output plugin and hence a conversion in calibre. If you are, then a lot of your points are valid and all I can say is that this is the way it works. But, most people talking about using calibre to get books onto the device a kepubs are talking about the KoboTouchExtended driver.

Lets put this simply, the following are the ways I know of to get a book on a Kobo device as a kepub:

Buy the book from Kobo and sync either of WiFi or via the desktop application. The advantage of this is that Kobo is doing the work to get the book into the correct format. And you can sync the reading status between devices and their apps. The disadvantages are that your book choice is "limit" to what Kobo have in their store and you have to buy the book.

Convert the book in calibre. This uses the Kepub Output plugin and puts the book through the full calibre conversion pipeline. The advantage of this is that it can be used to convert from any format that calibre supports and if you have multiple devices the conversion is only needed once. The disadvantage is that it will add the kepub to the calibre library and you can't do much with it there except send it to the device.

Use the KoboTouchExtended driver to transform the book to a kepub when sending it to the device. The advantages are that you don't need to store the kepub, that calibre will convert to epub if you only have some other format in the library and the driver (via the built-in KoboTouch driver) supports other functions such as updating metadata and collections on the device. And, while there are options to do some extra things, it makes the minimum changes needed for a kepub to work. The disadvantage is that it does the work each time the epub is sent to a device (more a concern if you have multiple devices).

Use kepubify to convert the book. (Note: I have never actually used kepubify and my knowledge comes from @geek1011's comments, the support page and looking at the code.) The big advantage is that you don't need calibre and it is reported to be faster. The disadvantage is that for a calibre user, you need to step outside calibre to do something, and you will probably need an extra step or two to achieve the desired result. And you are probably doing the work each time you send the epub is sent to a device (more a concern if you have multiple devices).


To me, the choice is simple: If you use calibre, use the KoboTouchExtended driver. If you don't use calibre, use kepubify. The main time kepubify would be an advantage to a calibre user is if they are setting up a new or factory reset device and are sending a lot of books to the device.

In general, I have been referring to my experience with the full conversion, as that the main thing I looked at when first trying Calibre. And the fact I don't totally know what it does refers mainly to the difference between the two processes (I wasn't even totally aware that there was one until it was mentioned here).

About the less intrusive part, I am not just referring to KTE, but the fact it requires Calibre and everything it comes with. And I admit kepubify does slightly more then it strictly needs to (but that's about as much extra as it does), but I disagree the HTML cleanup is unnecessary. For cleaning up the HTML, I those fixed were for actual issues I encountered in books, for example self closing title tags, which cause the document to appear empty in stricter parsers such as the one Kobo uses. Note that cleanup doesn't mean beautifying or validating or anything of that sort, which is intrusive. Invalid HTML will remain as invalid as it used to be, but as little as possible more. Badly formatted HTML will mostly remain that way. I have also had issues with the MS word tags, although I forgot the exact case. But, you have a point about the Adobe stuff being a bit of an extra.

I have had some conversion issues with The C++ Programming Language by Bjarne Stroustrop. I don't recall if it was due to KTE or the conversion, but I remember trying multiple times and having it hang or stall.

That two paragraphs sums it up pretty well. It's also why I mostly abandoned making a kepubify plugin for Calibre, but may still implement an option to convert an entire library. It is possible to convert an entire Calibre library using kepubify and still use it to manage the books (and multiple people have used this before). Basically, you drag the library on to kepubify, you batch rename the converted ones to .kepub, then you merge it back. You either need to already have kepub entries, update the metadata in the books and reimport as another format, or do a database trick (I think I have the SQL somewhere in one of my emails). I think I detailed most of the process somewhere else before.