Desktop App Choosing books to synch via desktop

[AColobus]

So after contacting Kobo about the hour-plus synch times I've been experiencing, I was (inevitably) told to do a factory reset. Begrudgingly I agreed. I've also installed the latest version of the desktop app (3.17) from scratch.

The first thing that happens is that this attempts to synch absolutely all of my books and then screams at me. The second is that, once I shut it up, I discovered there no longer seems to be a way to select or deselect books to synch?

Previous desktop versions had a little plus-minus sign I could flip to choose which books would be synched. There's no sign of it now, or any equivalent. Right-click menu is useless. Settings contains only language selection.

Does anyone know how I can now control my library so as to actually be able to use my Kobo? I'll be emailing Kobo again, but folks here are usually far more useful.

[PeterT]

The approach I've used in the past is to go to the Kobo website, logon to my account and then proceed to My Library http://www.kobobooks.com/library/library.html

Once there, select the books you DON'T want to download, and then click the DELETE button.

This moves the books to TRASH http://www.kobobooks.com/library/trash/index.html (from which they WON'T get dropped unless you do a DELETE FOREVER. Material in TRASH will not be synched to your device, and can be recovered by select the books and then the UNDELETE button.

[AColobus]

Oh hey, the signs are back now after a reboot. The Kobo is now playing other silly tricks instead; I'll update if necessary.

EDIT: I'm (or rather, Kobo are) an idiot. The plus and minus signs only appear when the Kobo is plugged in, even though there is no reason you would only want to plan and curate your collection for device synch when the Kobo is plugged in - and in fact, doing it beforehand and then running a synch will probably be more efficient than fighting to do so during live synch with its attendant hangs.

I am now performing a second factory reset. The original one plus bizarro synch attempt left me with the first page of each chapter of the five random books it consented to load, and a login screen loop whenever I tried to use the reader with the app again. Hoping this will fix it...

[AColobus]

Kobo has allegedly successfully set up, and I skipped book synching to avoid the earlier problem. It is still "synching your eReader" for some reason, and the plus/minus signs are no longer visible as they were during the brief period when my (login looping and therefore unsynchable) reader was plugged in previously.

After letting it finish, ejecting, letting the reader do some crunching for ten minutes, then plugging back in, the app begins synching books immediately and the plus/minus signs appear. Every book in the library is selected for synch, and clicking on the plus/minus signs (which are currently arrows indicating synch queued) has no effect. From the previous experience, I expect that once the Kobo is full, it will start shrieking and no longer let me control synch.

Experimentation suggests the only way to control this is to wait until a book has loaded, then find that book in my library and click to de-synch it. The process takes several minutes because the app slows to a crawl during synch (the original problem I complained about) and also because it has to load, then de-load the book. Looks like this will take a few hours of constant attention.

[AColobus]

After a long and tedious synch of a few books from the library, I detached my Kobo. It displays the first book, shown at 79% reading (I read it a bit on the desktop app - that's promising).

It reports that my library is empty. This is despite having 5 books supposedly synched to it, plus a number of others I sideloaded. Those files are, when I reconnect still on there.

[AColobus]

To summarise for posterity, and hopefully help someone else out:
1) I began with a functioning Kobo, but very slow synching via the desktop app
2) On Kobo's own instructions, I did a factory reset to address this. I also deleted and reinstalled the latest release of the desktop app.
3) The Kobo attempted to download all my books, choked, and claimed to be full while only containing the first page of each chapter of five books. Sync failed, and for some reason the app did not allow me to choose which books to synch (the plus/minus symbols did not display despite the Kobo being plugged in)
4) After another factory reset, the Kobo tried the same thing. I used Skip to prevent it, then was able to manually select a few books to install.
4a) Both the synched books, and books I tried to sideload, were ignored entirely by the Kobo despite being present on the device. The Kobo thought it was empty.
5) Turning the Kobo off for a while eventually persuaded it to believe in my books. I have not attempted to change it in any way since out of sheer paranoia. Perhaps I will just reread those five books eternally.

From my limited observation, I have no reason to think that the speed of sync has been in any way altered by this alarming two-day process. Nor have I received any response from Kobo to the four emails I sent in reply to their suggestion. Recommendations of more helpful ereader manufacturers will be gratefully received.

[Desdinova]

Try their Facebook page - they seem more forward there

[Desdinova]

There's also a possibility the internal memory is on its way out. Long sync suggests a long set of failing writes..

[Lynx-lynx]

For anyone wanting to go back to Desktop v 3.15 here is the link:

https://web.archive.org/web/20150505.../kobosetup.exe

[AColobus]

Originally Posted by Desdinova

There's also a possibility the internal memory is on its way out. Long sync suggests a long set of failing writes..

Good to know, thanks. Given its other issues (freezing for 2 minutes at a time, freeze-zooming) I already suspected some kind of hardware issue might be lurking. Possibly a hardware defect that only came to light with the newer firmware making more demands on it.

FWIW, Kobo have finally got back to me, although it's not a particularly coherent email and just asks for more information, so I'm not super impressed. Might get round to it once I finish moving house though...

Thanks for the advice as always, everyone.