Befuddled: Syncing read position between two devices using CC and Moon+ Reader Pro

[silvermuffin]

Hi there,

I've been using Calibre and CC to sync books from my laptop to my tablet and android phone. It works brilliantly, however for the life of me I can't seem to get the books to sync their read positions between my tablet and phone so that if I close the book on one device I can pick up where I left off on another (and I switch between these multiple times a day when I'm out and about). I'm not sparklingly technical, so I've tried to dig around to find a solution before posting here, apologies if I've missed this mentioned before but I've not been able to come across a solution thus far :3

I've followed the instructions here (http://cc_faq.multipie.co.uk/index.p...=54&artlang=en) to get identical filenames on both devices using solution 1, and enabled the option on both tablet and phone to 'use CC template everywhere' as well as 'replace existing book files'
I've enabled the option on both devices to 'update date read when read'
I've enabled dropbox sync on Moon+ reader on both devices, so that it should pick up reading progress. I've also steered well clear of syncing via GDrive...
I've set up dropbox and my SD cards as 'cloud providers' for both devices, in case that links them

I must be missing something really obvious, because when I close my book on my tablet and try to open it on my phone, both devices auto-open the book in Moon+ reader, but my book starts from the beginning with no read progress. Weirdly, I see dropbox notifying me of 'file edited' when I close the book which makes me think it should be doing something...
I have hundreds of books on calibre so I normally use 'connect as wireless device' which works perfectly, if that helps.

Thank you so much for the time taken to read this - any advice is very much appreciated!

Izzy

[theducks]

Reading position is under the purview of the reading app, not the librarian.

Most (all) do not pass back anything when connected to the Librarian (CC or Calibre)

The Kindle app talks to, syncs reading position via Amazon (if there is a connection) . Some others also do this type of sync. IN ALL cases, the same app is running on those devices

[stumped]

It is not obvi9us what you are doing wrong as a similar set up works fine for me. Is Dropbox sync enebled in the app OJ both devices. Can you look in Dropbox and check that files are being written, two per book, into apps books moon cache, I think that 8s the location,
How are you opening the book to resume, from cc or from moon recent list. Even without Dropbox sync, moon shouod open to last page read on that device, not to start of book.
Try, as a test, taking cc out of the loop and open via moon my files menu and recent menu to see if that makes a difference.
What you should see,when all is good is a pop up when you opeen the book saying there is a more recent position in Dropbox, go to it y/n
Another clue source is the recent list in moon, check if any books appear more than once there wnich would indicate a paths issue. That screen shows the full patch that moon is using

[stumped]

PS, yes it is moon not cc which tracks reading position but I can resume a book by selecting read in cc, cc calls moon and moon opens at last page read. It is not obvious why your books are not resuming correctly.
But test some more by removing one of the three players, cc, Dropbox, moon. Does resume work ok if you only use one device but mix and match open from cc, open from moon ?
PPS for any books, moon creates a database entry using book title and file path to book. It stores last page read in that database and also optionally writes a record 9f that to dropbox
You can get double entries on moon recent list by opening a two different wayswithks in internal device storage because moon uses a symlink of SD card for its file paths whereas cc does not. I have posted and discussed that with Charley elsewhere. The fix is to consistently always open books the same way.

[stumped]

To clarify the paths thing. Cc put my books in storage emulated 0 books. If I use the my files selecfor in moon to locate my books on device it says they are in ... SDcard/bookswhich is some sort of symlink. If I open a book via my files , that symlink forms part of the path. If I open from cc and then resume either from cc or from recent list in moon, the symlink is not used, so that is what I do.

[silvermuffin]

Hi theducks and stumped,

Thank you so much for your advice. After lots of trial and error, I think I've zeroed in on the issue as a paths issue as you suggested. The pathfiles are identical both in name, in locations, in Moon recent lists etc, so I went to see where each dropbox notification was taking me after each time I closed a book.

Stumped, I went into the dropbox/apps/books/moon+/cache folder and as you say, there are, annoyingly, 2 x files being generated for each book, however the difference isn't in the names but with each book having 1 x file ending in .epub.po (the tablet) and the other ending in .epun.an (the phone). They are now correctly saving next to each other but, for some reason, this slight difference in epub format (?) is making them miss each other consistently which I'm guessing is the source of the issue. Is there any way this can be fixed?

[silvermuffin]

Just to add, I've tried opening just from CC, and seperately tried opening just from Moon+ recent list, to try and narrow it down, but the issue of them not linking somehow is still there :S

[stumped]

you have misunderstood the mechanism
2 files per book in dropbox is correct and normal. epub.po holds last position read , epub.an other holds annotations, highlights, & probably bookmarks. they are created when moon first writes to dropbox re that book. and the highlights.. file is created even if empty.
I get the same 2 files and I don't use a phone, so it is not phone vs tablet. i dont see any .epun. files - I assume that is a typo in your post ?
i suspect that one of your installed apps is not correctly linked to dropbox, so is not writing to it that should be easy to verify as dropbox will have timestamps, so opening a book on device 1, change page, check dropbox, open on device 2... should give useful clues

if books are opening at page 1, and not at the last read page for either device, that is a different puzzle to address.

moon recent files page should show last page read on each device, does that seem to be working OK ?
# and , testing each device separately, if you open a book, move to next chapter say, close it, reopen it, does it re-open correctly
remind us please how you are opening the books to resume reading
i wonder if something is supressing the pop up which says "more recent position in dropbox, go to it y/n" and so it is defaulting to n. do you run any apps that could be doing that ?
FYI the exact sequence that I see ( assuming I have read further on device 2, then re-opened on device 1) - the book will open at the last page read on device 1 ( which is also as shown on the % read in device 1's recent list. then there will be an immediate pop up overlaying that open page asking if I want to go to the more recent position in dropbox. I tap Y , and it does that.
I do recall that a few updates ago of moon+, the dropbox permission had to be reset because either moon or dropbox tweaked the API interface, but that was a one off thing. if you missed it though, it might explain why one of t your installs is no longer writing to , or reading to dropbox. Either that or you have multiple dropbox accounts ( like me) and you are not using the same one on both devices

[silvermuffin]

Apologies for misunderstanding and thank you for pointing me in the right direction! Having gone through and made sense of the suggestions, and eliminating all the possibilities with the error still remaining, I got in touch with the Moon+ dev and it turns out there was indeed an error. After a fair bit of deleting/reinstalling and clearing caches, it seems to be getting resolved. Still getting an error but the books are actually picking up the read progress which is more than enough. No more lost chunks of books! Thank you again :-)