Sort by Recent not working

[Siavahda]

I set the KoboTouch Utilities plugin to control the collections on my Kobo, and now Sort: Recent doesn't send the most recently opened book to the top of the My Books view.

Instead there's a bunch of books marked Finished. If I open one, instead of going to the top, it vanishes somewhere else. These are books I have in fact finished, that are marked as/on my custom shelf Read on Calibre.

I'm guessing that has something to do with this? But I can't figure out how to undo/fix it.

Inside the collections on my Kobo, sort: recent etc all work normally. The device date and time are correct. If I scroll down far enough, the books marked Finished stop, and everything below that is normal. Marking the Finished books as Unread makes them jump to the bottom of this section, down to where the books are arranged normally. This is also where books vanish to when I open them. It's like they're sorted by recent only after this point; above this point, it's Finished, in alphabetical order by title.

Running a database check with KoboUtilities didn't find anything.

I'm pretty sure going through one by one and manually switching the status of each book to unread will sort this. But that's hundreds of books, so I'm really hoping someone knows a quicker fix!

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Siavahda

I set the KoboTouch Utilities plugin to control the collections on my Kobo, and now Sort: Recent doesn't send the most recently opened book to the top of the My Books view.

Instead there's a bunch of books marked Finished. If I open one, instead of going to the top, it vanishes somewhere else. These are books I have in fact finished, that are marked as/on my custom shelf Read on Calibre.

I'm guessing that has something to do with this? But I can't figure out how to undo/fix it.

Inside the collections on my Kobo, sort: recent etc all work normally. The device date and time are correct. If I scroll down far enough, the books marked Finished stop, and everything below that is normal. Marking the Finished books as Unread makes them jump to the bottom of this section, down to where the books are arranged normally. This is also where books vanish to when I open them. It's like they're sorted by recent only after this point; above this point, it's Finished, in alphabetical order by title.

Running a database check with KoboUtilities didn't find anything.

I'm pretty sure going through one by one and manually switching the status of each book to unread will sort this. But that's hundreds of books, so I'm really hoping someone knows a quicker fix!

There is no need to use Kobo Utilities to set recent. On your Kobo, in My Books, set the Filter to what you want be it all or Reading and set Sort to Recent. These options are above the first book in the list on screen.

What is it you you do with Kobo Utilities to control your collections that you cannot do with calibre and the KoboTouch driver? I don't see anything unless I'm mistaken.

[Siavahda]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

There is no need to use Kobo Utilities to set recent. On your Kobo, in My Books, set the Filter to what you want be it all or Reading and set Sort to Recent. These options are above the first book in the list on screen.

What is it you you do with Kobo Utilities to control your collections that you cannot do with calibre and the KoboTouch driver? I don't see anything unless I'm mistaken.

??? I'm not using Kobo Utilities to set recent? At least not on purpose? I don't even know HOW to do that. I (thought I) only set the collections to copy over from Calibre to the Kobo. I ticked the Collections box in the collections-covers-and-uploads tab.

On my Kobo, in My Books, it is set to sort: recent. And it's not working. I did not deliberately screw it up, but the only thing I did right before it was tick the Collections box in Utilities, so I mentioned doing that in case it's relevant.

[DNSB]

Sort recent is the last access date. Sort by date added will sort by the date the book was added or whatever Kobo Utilities sets from it's date option when updating metadata.

As for adding books to my Finished collection, I used a custom column which basically says Finished when the Kobo reading percentage is 100.

Misc. column build from other columns templates:
Finished

{:'cmp(field('#koboreadpct'),100,'','Finished','Finished')'}

Book Reading Time

program:

	total = $#kobo_time_spent_reading;

	hours = floor(total/3600);
	minutes = floor(mod(total, 3600)/60);
	seconds = mod(total, 60);
	def format(v, str):
    if v == 0 then return '' fi;
    return v & ' ' & str & ' '
fed;
format(hours, 'hr') & format(minutes, 'min') & format(seconds, 'sec')

Remaining Reading Time

program:

total = $#kobo_rest_of_book_estimate;
hours = floor(total/3600);
minutes = round((total-hours*3600)/60);

def format(v, str):
    if v == 0 then return '' fi;
    return v & ' ' & str & ' '
fed;
format(hours, 'hr') & format(minutes, 'min')

[Siavahda]

Originally Posted by DNSB

Sort recent is the last access date. Sort by date added will sort by the date the book was added or whatever Kobo Utilities sets from it's date option when updating metadata.

As for adding books to my Finished collection, I used a custom column which basically says Finished when the Kobo reading percentage is 100.

I know what sort by recent is. The problem is that it wasn't working. Sort by date added isn't what I want, I'm not sure what that has to do with anything?

I went through and manually switched all the books to unfinished/unread, and that worked. But I still don't know what happened and I'd rather it didn't happen again.

You mentioned Kobo Utilities can edit the date options on files? Is that what could have happened here? Is there a way to switch that off/configure it so this doesn't happen again?

I don't want a Finished/Read collection on my Kobo. I have a custom shelf on Calibre that is called Read, which I do not want to interact with my Kobo at all. (I only wanted Kobo Utilities controlling collections in the first place so that one specific Calibre shelf would be turned into a Kobo collection. That's now done.)

Currently the Collections tab/square in Kobo Utilities is unchecked to make sure of that.

[JSWolf]

You don't use Kobo Utilities to manage your Read collection. You use calibre and the KoboTouch driver.

In Preferences, go to Sending books to devices and make sure that Metadata management is set to Automatic management.

Next, in Preferences, go to Plugins and search for KoboTouch. select Customize plugin. Select Collections, covers, & uploads. Then select Collections. Collections columns, Create collections, and Delete empty collections. Next to Collections column, put in the name of the column you have your collections named.

Then when you next plug in your Kobo to your computer and calibre libraray, calibre and the KoboTouch driver will manage your collections. So if you name your collection Read for a book you just finished, it will be moved to Read automatically.

[Siavahda]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

You don't use Kobo Utilities to manage your Read collection. You use calibre and the KoboTouch driver.

In Preferences, go to Sending books to devices and make sure that Metadata management is set to Automatic management.

Next, in Preferences, go to Plugins and search for KoboTouch. select Customize plugin. Select Collections, covers, & uploads. Then select Collections. Collections columns, Create collections, and Delete empty collections. Next to Collections column, put in the name of the column you have your collections named.

Then when you next plug in your Kobo to your computer and calibre libraray, calibre and the KoboTouch driver will manage your collections. So if you name your collection Read for a book you just finished, it will be moved to Read automatically.

But I don't want any of that. None of that, as far as I can tell, has anything to do with my issue. This is not about my collections, *unless* the reason my Kobo marked so many books as Finished suddenly is because it synced somehow with my Read shelf on Calibre, if it decided anything in the Read shelf was Finished. I don't know if that's possible, it's just a guess, because checking the Collections box in Kobo Utilities is what I did right before Recent stopped working/all those books were marked Finished. I don't know what information is relevant, what would help someone, like you, work out the problem, so I mentioned the collections thing in case it was relevant.

The issue is: a bunch of my books were suddenly marked Finished. Because of this, sort: recent was not working/accurate; all those Finished books were at the top, instead of the books I'd *actually* interacted with most recently. Opening any Finished book did not send it to the top, but to beneath this swathe of books newly marked Finished, about a third of the way down my My Books view.

What worked was manually marking all those books as Unread. At that point everything was working normally, and books most recently interacted with went to the top like they should.

I am not trying to manage my collections or my shelves. I would like to know what happened, how all those books got marked as Finished, so I can make sure not to do it again.

[Sirtel]

AFAIK there is no collections box in Kobo Utilities. You presumably mean the Kobo driver, which is not the same as the Kobo Utilities plugin. You just access it from the plugin.

That's what caused the confusion.

[JSWolf]

What you probably did was to use Kobo Utilities option to change the reading status.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

What you probably did was to use Kobo Utilities option to change the reading status.

That should not be possible with newer calibre versions. Some options that are shown greyed out for that reason.