Phantom books on brand new reader?

[Gadgetguy]

Hello all,

I have a brand new Kobo Forma.

I have transferred my book collection to it (539 books) - and for some reason the reader shows 541 books. (It showed 0 books originally)

When I check under "series", I see several unknown books:
The Folk of the Air from Holly Black
Me before you Trilogy from Jojo Moyes
Thriller from Andy Weir
L'amie prodigieuse from Elen Ferrante
Suspense / Thriller from Daniel Silva
I casi del Comissiario Adamsberg from Fred Vargas (this seems to be in Italian? I do not speak italian)
and one more in Chinese (I do not speak Chinese either)

(I have 6 Phantom books - so not sure how the 541 books come from with 539 loaded...)

When I search these books on the Kobo, they do not show up in the search results but they always show in the series view.

When I select any of these phantom books, the Kobo tells me
"You have no books yet" and gives a button for "Shop Kobo"...

What is going on? Where are these books from? How do I remove them?

Did I maybe get a refurb unit with some garbage left from the previous owner? It looked new - but who knows? The rubber area around the buttons did not look spotless, but I thought that is ok even when new? There was a screen protector on and the box was sealed - bought it directly from Kobo...

Thank you for your thoughts...

[Gadgetguy]

Update: after investigating this further, it seems now certain, that Kobo has sent me a refurb unit instead of a brand new one !!!!

I will return it (who knows why it was returned by the previous owner???) and get a replacement unit. Will take about 2 weeks...

Totally not impressed!

[MGlitch]

Originally Posted by Gadgetguy

Update: after investigating this further, it seems now certain, that Kobo has sent me a refurb unit instead of a brand new one !!!!

I will return it (who knows why it was returned by the previous owner???) and get a replacement unit. Will take about 2 weeks...

Totally not impressed!

Given that the kobo servers are down, it's not entirely surprising you're having some weird issues. What, besides some oddities which apparently only appeared after you side loaded books, leads you to think it's a refurb? How did you load these books on? Are you sure the metadata those books is correctly set?

Since it initially showed zero, it is far more likely that there was an issue in transferring content over.

[JAC70]

IIRC, Kobo preloads some crap on new readers.

[MGlitch]

Originally Posted by JAC70

IIRC, Kobo preloads some crap on new readers.

Hasn’t been the case for my Aura H2O, Aura One, or either Forma I’ve had.

I’d be more inclined to suspect either a hink in the sideloaded content or a hink in how gadgetguy hacked his device to get around registration

[Gadgetguy]

Originally Posted by MGlitch

Given that the kobo servers are down, it's not entirely surprising you're having some weird issues. What, besides some oddities which apparently only appeared after you side loaded books, leads you to think it's a refurb? How did you load these books on? Are you sure the metadata those books is correctly set?

Since it initially showed zero, it is far more likely that there was an issue in transferring content over.

Well, I observed several things.

The first one (which I still considered ok) was that there were a number of fingerprints on the rubbery area when I opened the box "new" (above and below the page turn buttons).

Then, there were a good number of books which showed up only in the "series" view but otherwise were not there (so they did not show up in search). I also had no way to delete them (as they did not show up anywhere other than the series view)

The books I talk about where in English, Chinese, Italian and French. I do not speak Chinese and Italian and I do not have any books in those languages. I speak French but I do not have French books either.

My library (in Calibre) has 539 books - but for some reason additional books showed up - so after transferring the 539 books Kobo told me there were 541 (from the original zero). (Not sure where the difference of 2 - as I had about 6 ghost books)

I have done now a factory reset and transferred all books again (the same way I did originally) - and the "ghost books" did not come back. And I have now 539 books both in Calibre and on the Kobo. All the series are clean too.
Everything is as it should be - quite different from before (despite doing the EXACT same steps, with the only exception that now I did a factory reset, which I did not do on the brand new unit)

So nothing is certain, but it is VERY likely that the unit is a refurb...

[Gadgetguy]

Originally Posted by MGlitch

Hasn’t been the case for my Aura H2O, Aura One, or either Forma I’ve had.

I’d be more inclined to suspect either a hink in the sideloaded content or a hink in how gadgetguy hacked his device to get around registration

The hack was using this https://yingtongli.me/blog/2018/07/30/kobo-rego.html

Should have zero impact related to the appearance of ghost books (or finger prints )

The sideloaded content (I think) is clean. Especially since after loading again (after factory reset) all the ghost books etc. have disappeared and all the series are exactly the way they should be.

[CaptCaveman]

Originally Posted by Gadgetguy

The hack was using this https://yingtongli.me/blog/2018/07/30/kobo-rego.html

Should have zero impact related to the appearance of ghost books (or finger prints )

I had *exactly* the same problem, after doing the same SQLite insert to avoid having to login. Did a factory reset and just signed onto Kobo and all is good now.

Same list of books and everything. Wonder if this is some test metadata built in to the database linked to the dummy user we created.