[GUI Plugin] Kobo Utilities

[speakingtohe]

Originally Posted by jgoguen

There is a good reason for them not to scan the kepub folder though. They put their files in there and those files should not be scanned cause the Kobo process adds the information directly before the scanner runs.

Does this mean that if you have all kepubs the sheves would open faster? Just curious.

Helen

[jgoguen]

I can't say with certainty but I suspect no. I believe the speed opening shelves is related to the size of the result set returned from querying the database; there's a database table holding all the shelf details and a second table linking to that one which holds references to the content of each shelf, which itself requires linking into the content table to get the full display for the shelf listing.

[davidfor]

That has been my conclusion to. Plus, there is a complication added by the SD card. Books on the shelves can be on the SD card. If it is missing, then those books aren't included in the lists or counted in the shelf list. But, it doesn't explain why the shelf list is so slow. They are either doing something terrible in getting the list or building the pages takes a lot longer than I would expect.

[speakingtohe]

Originally Posted by davidfor

That has been my conclusion to. Plus, there is a complication added by the SD card. Books on the shelves can be on the SD card. If it is missing, then those books aren't included in the lists or counted in the shelf list. But, it doesn't explain why the shelf list is so slow. They are either doing something terrible in getting the list or building the pages takes a lot longer than I would expect.

I'd bet money on something terribly unnecessary . Not by intention of course. I guess we all flail around aimlessly on occasion. Some just like to flail longer.

Helen

[rboatright]

Problem with Kobo Mini and shelves

Can someone please point me to instructions on getting shelves to work on the Kobo Mini?

I've read through much of this thread, tried many things I thought I understood, and have thus far utterly failed to get it to create shelves, put things on shelves, delete empty shelves, or pretty much admit that shelves exist.

I can, of course, manipulate shelves by hand on the device, but who wants to do that?

I'm -trying- to create shelves for series and authors. :-/ but to date... utter failure.

Calibre 1.10 Kobo Utilities 1.4.1 KoboTouchTextended 2.2.12 Kobo device software version 2.6.2 (9/27/13)

I've factory reset, re-initialized and updated and tried from scratch -- and I'm missing a step. Help please.

[PeterT]

There is a sticky thread in the Kobo forum with detailed instructions on how its done.

Read the first post there and ask away in that thread.

[met67]

Originally Posted by jgoguen

I can't say with certainty but I suspect no. I believe the speed opening shelves is related to the size of the result set returned from querying the database; there's a database table holding all the shelf details and a second table linking to that one which holds references to the content of each shelf, which itself requires linking into the content table to get the full display for the shelf listing.

I was wandering if we could speed up the shelves list by adding some indexes to the DB... I gave a quick look at the libraries but the queries seems to be built on the fly so we should use some tool to trace them and look for possible improvements.

[jgoguen]

You may be able to speed it up, but probably not by much. The bottleneck here is, I believe, the I/O performance of the device. The disk I/O is probably quite good, but except for the Aura HD and the Aura you're looking at fairly low-powered devices. Although I had a shelf on a Glo with maybe 100 books and it was quite responsive.

[speakingtohe]

Originally Posted by jgoguen

You may be able to speed it up, but probably not by much. The bottleneck here is, I believe, the I/O performance of the device. The disk I/O is probably quite good, but except for the Aura HD and the Aura you're looking at fairly low-powered devices. Although I had a shelf on a Glo with maybe 100 books and it was quite responsive.

I must respectively disagree. There are earlier devices with slower processors and slower memory that seem to perform faster with far more than 100 books.

Helen

[jgoguen]

Fair enough. My experience with older devices than the Glo is really limited to the original Kobo Wifi, which performed quite poorly for almost any operation.

[PeterT]

I think you have to take the whole application approach into account here.

While yes, other devices might handle shelves / collections faster, with lesser h/w, Kobo have decided to go for possibly a more complex approach with a consistent architecture across all eReader devices.

[speakingtohe]

Originally Posted by PeterT

I think you have to take the whole application approach into account here.

While yes, other devices might handle shelves / collections faster, with lesser h/w, Kobo have decided to go for possibly a more complex approach with a consistent architecture across all eReader devices.

I think the word possibly may be key

Still I agree that they have a right to do as they think best. And if not always a fun ride, yourself and davidfor have made it an interesting one in that I have learned a lot from both of you and others too of course.

But.. I often wish that Kobo would just concentrate on the areas one at a time and get each one working whether it be reader, desktop app or store. What's up with this multiple shelves thing being around for so long for instance? Can't be rocket science surely or dependent on processor speed?

Helen

[davidfor]

I had a play with extra and changed indexes a while ago. I didn't see a noticeable improvement.

To me 3.0.0 is a lot faster opening the shelf list. At the moment I have 75 shelves. Most have less than ten books. But two have 130 and 147. The list is taking about 6 seconds to open. But, I'm down on my shelves as I did a factory reset on the weekend. Before that, I had 1400 books (940 on the SD card) across 20+ pages of shelves. There was a shelf with all the SD card books and several that were more then 200 books. The shelf list was opening in less than 20 seconds. Still not great, but better than older firmware.

[speakingtohe]

Originally Posted by davidfor

I had a play with extra and changed indexes a while ago. I didn't see a noticeable improvement.

To me 3.0.0 is a lot faster opening the shelf list. At the moment I have 75 shelves. Most have less than ten books. But two have 130 and 147. The list is taking about 6 seconds to open. But, I'm down on my shelves as I did a factory reset on the weekend. Before that, I had 1400 books (940 on the SD card) across 20+ pages of shelves. There was a shelf with all the SD card books and several that were more then 200 books. The shelf list was opening in less than 20 seconds. Still not great, but better than older firmware.

My shelf opening went from 55 seconds to 50 seconds with 3.0.0. Timed it twice before and twice after update.

Of course I do have more shelves and one with 247 books.

Oh well it is a smidge faster.

Helen

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by speakingtohe

My shelf opening went from 55 seconds to 50 seconds with 3.0.0. Timed it twice before and twice after update.

Of course I do have more shelves and one with 247 books.

Oh well it is a smidge faster.

Just put the test SD card back in. This has 912 epubs and 283 PDF on it. Using series for shelves plus a few others, I ended up with 33 pages of shelves. There is a shelf for the epubs (912), the PDFs (283) and five more with over 120 books. The shelf list took about 55 seconds. So, maybe not as much of an improvement as I thought.