My Kobo library screen

[Manabi]

Originally Posted by shalym

With all of the options available today, why would anyone keep their precious files in only one place??

One reason that people might not do cloud backups are bandwidth quotas. I am unfortunate that I live in one of Comcast's "test" areas for quotas and have a 300GB month quota. I run up against it every month, and have been unable to backup everything I want to due to cost. I calculated up what it would cost in overages to backup my entire raid array at one point (a little over 8TB used) and it would cost well over $1,000. So it's not backed up to the cloud. Comcast has announced they're raising the quotas to 1TB monthly starting June 1st, so I'll be able to start backing it up then. I'll try to devote 500GB a month to it, but it'll be over a year to back it up fully.

Originally Posted by davidfor

This one always amuses me. There is lots of discussion about copyright and the license associated with ebooks. Everyone seems to want it more like paper books. But, here is one place that everyone seems to think it must NOT be like paper books. It seems that authors/publishers/retailers are expect to replace the version you bought with an updated version for the rest of your life.

Personally I don't care about that. The only times I would feel an update should be mandatory is if the original e-book was a total formatting disaster. Otherwise I don't go back and re-download looking for an update.

Originally Posted by DNSB

Seagate 3TB external that decided to die--under warranty but if it had been the only backup, that would have been a slim consolation.

Oh god, Seagate 3TB drives... I built my raid array using five internal Seagate 3TB drives. Three failed before the warranty was up, one just after and one is still alive but has a health status that amounts to "going to die any day now." Those things are just total crap, and I'll never, EVER buy a Seagate hard drive again as long as I live. If someone gave me one for free, I'd be extremely leery of using it. On the bright side, thank goodness I used raid 5. I was able to swap in new drives (HGST this time) when each one failed and rebuild.

Originally Posted by Nate the great

Pfffft. I would never trust myself to remember everything. That's what cave walls are for.

So you're saying the cave paintings are just someone's backups?

[Marcy]

Originally Posted by Purple Lady

You can still get to the old library page here https://www.kobobooks.com/library/library.html Ferrywoman

I no longer ever go to my Kobo account but checked because of this thread. Going to this old library page shows 279 books in my library, but the "new and improved page" shows only 228. I have everything backed up so I'm not worried about the missing 51 books but that's pretty unacceptable service.

[JSWolf]

I am download all of my books in my Kobo library. Not because I don't already have them, but because some of them may have been updated and this way, I can see if I have the latest versions.

[Lynx-lynx]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

I am download all of my books in my Kobo library. Not because I don't already have them, but because some of them may have been updated and this way, I can see if I have the latest versions.

Jon I seem to recall others informing that Kobo doesn't update the editions already purchased; they newly release an updated version and one would have to pay for the updated version.

Or, I suppose one could contact Customer Service and request that Kobo provide the updated version.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by Alpha o

I far prefer a plain old file tree.

When I looked at those books on the Kobo using windows explorer, there was no file extension. I looked in every file marked Kobo on the computer and saw nothing except stuff that reminded me of dll files or something saying fully parsed. Nothing that could be opened by another reader. No book as far as I was concerned.

Plain old file tree? As you said, old. Time to move into the 21th century.

Given that you are using a Windows computer, you can open the files downloaded by the Kobo desktop app or on the Kobo eInk ereaders though many of the ones I have are DRMed so are not readable without running them through Obok. Install the Kobo desktop application, allow it to sync your files and then decrypt them using Obok -- use the Calibre Obok plugin and decrypt directly into your Calibre libraries. Yes, the file names that look like GUIDs are a bit odd but really saying they look like .dll files? Have you looked at Smashword's idea of an epub file naming convention?

Originally Posted by Alpha o

I bought the damn book, I should have gotten an epub. Calibre would just read /open the book but would do nothing else with it. Couldn't unlock it or any of them using Obok.

I vaguely seem to remember the old Kobo web interface had a download option. Either ePub or DRMed ePub in most cases -- it's been a couple of days and the old memory cells aren't what they used to be . For the new library interface, click on the triple dots and export the file. Easy-peasy in either case.

As for decrypting from/on the device, that's not an option at this time.

Originally Posted by Alpha o

I do read on an Acer tablet at night, and it's easier to go through Dropbox or move the SD card than bother with Kobo reader.

Your choice. I seem to remember from looking on my Nexus, the Kobo app disassembled the zip format the ebook is normally stored in into it's individual files for storage which made things a bit messier.

As for reading on a tablet? I do use my Nexus or iPad for reading but the Kobo eInk ereader is my goto device for epub format ebooks.

... miscellaneous whinging deleted....

Originally Posted by Alpha o

I find a lot of Calibre to be a perfect pain. I am a fanboy of nothing. I simply don't need or care about all the info you can put in. Nor do I care about rewards for how fast or how many books I'm reading. I also don't annotate books. I do annotate how to guides and manuals.

You have the right to be a fanboy, I have the right to say it stinks.

Given your whinging about Calibre elsewhere, while many of us find Calibre to be a very handy tool, you definitely qualify as not being a fanboy.

Some of us do care about the information we can attach to our ebooks though it seems few of us are able to agree on just what information is important. How fast I am reading or how many books I read are not of interest to me though those are items I see on my Kobo ereader home screen not in Calibre. Am I missing a special section in Calibre with that information?

Also, might I ask who has been forcing you to annotate your books as well as how to guides and manuals? Enquiring minds are eager to know more about the annotation police.

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by Alpha o

I far prefer a plain old file tree.

When I looked at those books on the Kobo using windows explorer, there was no file extension. I looked in every file marked Kobo on the computer and saw nothing except stuff that reminded me of dll files or something saying fully parsed. Nothing that could be opened by another reader. No book as far as I was concerned.

I bought the damn book, I should have gotten an epub.

You did get an epub. One of the things that is being discussed in this thread is how to download that epub. You also got a kepub, which is what Kobo uses for their devices and syncing.

Calibre would just read /open the book but would do nothing else with it. Couldn't unlock it or any of them using Obok.

I haven't seen any reports that Obok is not working for several months. As I suggested, check you have the latest version of Obok. If you do, report the error to the developers of Obok. Without being told there is a problem, there is no way they can fix it.

I do read on an Acer tablet at night, and it's easier to go through Dropbox or move the SD card than bother with Kobo reader.

I did get that message about the SD card from Kobo. I put all the books on the SD card rather than the main. It's where I want them. Apparently Kobo doesn't think so.

Someone stated that recently, maybe you, and it didn't agree with my memory. So, I went through the firmware looking for a message like that. There wasn't one. The closest was one about using the SD card for storage if needed. But, as the card is in the device, of course the device will do some management. Pull it out and the device can't touch it. And the device only touches files on the card it puts there. I does not touch sideloaded books except to allow you to read them. If there are non-book files on the device, they are COMPLETELY ignored.

The message about needing wifi just appeared when I took out the password for our wifi.
I usually just turn it off and no remarks, but deleting the account generated the message.

So you removed the WiFi password and the next time you did something that needed WiFi, it asked for the password? Wow, how demanding of the system. I bet that when you didn't supply the password all it said was it couldn't do that function and kept letting you do unimportant things like, say, read a book.

I find a lot of Calibre to be a perfect pain. I am a fanboy of nothing. I simply don't need or care about all the info you can put in. Nor do I care about rewards for how fast or how many books I'm reading. I also don't annotate books. I do annotate how to guides and manuals.

You have the right to be a fanboy, I have the right to say it stinks.

I don't normally consider myself a fanboy of anything. The usual thing I consider myself is someone who uses tools to achieve a purpose. I choose the one that suits me the most. I generally make sure I understand what is going on. That way I can use those tools better. But, sometimes I do decide to not learn and treat it as a black-box.

The other thing is that if I have a problem and ask about it, I actually listen to the answer and try to act on it. And if I make a statement about how something works and someone demonstrates I am wrong, I accept that. I'll probably try and work out why I thought what I did, but that is related to trying to work out how it all works and use it better.

Now, I like calibre and know a lot about how it works and how to use it. I like my Kobo devices. And again, I know a lot about how they work and how to use it to best achieve what I want (just so you know, that is to be able to read). And I haven't seen anything else that would be better for me. If that makes me a fanboy, then I'll have to accept that. And while I assume you mean it as an insult, I can only take it as a compliment.

[MacEachaidh]

Originally Posted by Lynx-lynx

Jon I seem to recall others informing that Kobo doesn't update the editions already purchased; they newly release an updated version and one would have to pay for the updated version.

Or, I suppose one could contact Customer Service and request that Kobo provide the updated version.

It's an interesting question. If the book is misformatted in part, or poorly formatted (so many are!), or has content missing, and that's corrected ... then shouldn't the first book be replaced as defective? A paper book would be. (And has been, in my own real-life experience.) Further, I think Kobo (or whichever vendor) should be proactive in offering the corrected version, and not leave it to the purchaser to find out about it and request it. If it's simply a new edition of the book, then that's obviously a different story.

Originally Posted by DNSB

Plain old file tree? As you said, old. Time to move into the 21th century.

But why? If the stuff from the 20st [ ;-) ] does what you need and is still a comfortable fit ...

Some of us do care about the information we can attach to our ebooks though it seems few of us are able to agree on just what information is important.

Fair enough too. I don't think anyone said *no-one* should care about it. Speaking solely for myself, I'm not interested in all the annotation capabilities of Calibre, because I personally find the value it returns to be far less than the effort of updating the data for every book included in the system. And that in turn means I don't use Calibre, because my subjective experience is that if those kinds of facilities aren't useful to me, then the app becomes unnecessarily complex for what I *am* using it for. Subjectively, I find a hierarchical folder structure based on genre and author quite sufficient for me to find what I want. And for editing or conversion: If necessary, I use obok at a command line, Sigil for small amendments and Jutoh if I need to reformat extensively.

[lkmiller]

Originally Posted by DNSB

As for decrypting from/on the device, that's not an option at this time.

You can decrypt books directly from a Kobo device with the Obok plugin.

(Incidentally, I've decided Alpha o is living in a parallel universe that is very different from mine. No point in trying to help from here because it doesn't seem to apply over there. )

[Alpha o]

Originally Posted by davidfor

You did get an epub. One of the things that is being discussed in this thread is how to download that epub. You also got a kepub, which is what Kobo uses for their devices and syncing.

I haven't seen any reports that Obok is not working for several months. As I suggested, check you have the latest version of Obok. If you do, report the error to the developers of Obok. Without being told there is a problem, there is no way they can fix it.

Someone stated that recently, maybe you, and it didn't agree with my memory. So, I went through the firmware looking for a message like that. There wasn't one. The closest was one about using the SD card for storage if needed. But, as the card is in the device, of course the device will do some management. Pull it out and the device can't touch it. And the device only touches files on the card it puts there. I does not touch sideloaded books except to allow you to read them. If there are non-book files on the device, they are COMPLETELY ignored.

So you removed the WiFi password and the next time you did something that needed WiFi, it asked for the password? Wow, how demanding of the system. I bet that when you didn't supply the password all it said was it couldn't do that function and kept letting you do unimportant things like, say, read a book.


I don't normally consider myself a fanboy of anything. The usual thing I consider myself is someone who uses tools to achieve a purpose. I choose the one that suits me the most. I generally make sure I understand what is going on. That way I can use those tools better. But, sometimes I do decide to not learn and treat it as a black-box.

The other thing is that if I have a problem and ask about it, I actually listen to the answer and try to act on it. And if I make a statement about how something works and someone demonstrates I am wrong, I accept that. I'll probably try and work out why I thought what I did, but that is related to trying to work out how it all works and use it better.

Now, I like calibre and know a lot about how it works and how to use it. I like my Kobo devices. And again, I know a lot about how they work and how to use it to best achieve what I want (just so you know, that is to be able to read). And I haven't seen anything else that would be better for me. If that makes me a fanboy, then I'll have to accept that. And while I assume you mean it as an insult, I can only take it as a compliment.

You must not read much else then. I like news aggregators for tech headlines.
Slashdot and the Digital Reader have now posted it.
https://news.slashdot.org/story/16/0...%28Slashdot%29

http://the-digital-reader.com/2016/0...ibrary-update/


As for removing the wifi password, I have it memorized. I enter it every time I want to print from my phone. The phone has it, the printer doesn't.

All of the Android apps I have will function without any connection. The databases are downloaded to the memory, and so is the purchase key.

Dark sky sites for astronomy often have nothing. I'm partial to places where my carrier isn't. Same for birds and wildflowers.

If the book came down as a DRM free epub, it should have the file extension. Windows, Android and Linux should see the extension and any reader that reads epub should be able to open it.

[Alpha o]

Originally Posted by MacEachaidh

It's an interesting question. If the book is misformatted in part, or poorly formatted (so many are!), or has content missing, and that's corrected ... then shouldn't the first book be replaced as defective? A paper book would be. (And has been, in my own real-life experience.) Further, I think Kobo (or whichever vendor) should be proactive in offering the corrected version, and not leave it to the purchaser to find out about it and request it. If it's simply a new edition of the book, then that's obviously a different story.


But why? If the stuff from the 20st [ ;-) ] does what you need and is still a comfortable fit ...


Fair enough too. I don't think anyone said *no-one* should care about it. Speaking solely for myself, I'm not interested in all the annotation capabilities of Calibre, because I personally find the value it returns to be far less than the effort of updating the data for every book included in the system. And that in turn means I don't use Calibre, because my subjective experience is that if those kinds of facilities aren't useful to me, then the app becomes unnecessarily complex for what I *am* using it for. Subjectively, I find a hierarchical folder structure based on genre and author quite sufficient for me to find what I want. And for editing or conversion: If necessary, I use obok at a command line, Sigil for small amendments and Jutoh if I need to reformat extensively.

Exactly. Thank you

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by Alpha o

You must not read much else then. I like news aggregators for tech headlines.
Slashdot and the Digital Reader have now posted it.
https://news.slashdot.org/story/16/0...%28Slashdot%29

Did you actually read the post and the references? And follow any links. They all point to here. The only source of information on this is THIS thread.

And yes, it's bad that books have been lost from their libraries. But, as is noted in the articles, Kobo is helping to recover those books and get them back into the library.

As for removing the wifi password, I have it memorized. I enter it every time I want to print from my phone. The phone has it, the printer doesn't.

All of the Android apps I have will function without any connection. The databases are downloaded to the memory, and so is the purchase key.

Well, good those devices work with or without the WiFi enabled as needed. It's good that the Kobo devices do as well.

Dark sky sites for astronomy often have nothing. I'm partial to places where my carrier isn't. Same for birds and wildflowers.

If the book came down as a DRM free epub, it should have the file extension. Windows, Android and Linux should see the extension and any reader that reads epub should be able to open it.

The Kobo firmware downloads books as kepubs. Nowhere is there anything that says they have to send it to the device in a format suitable for use but other applications or devices. For those purposes, Kobo allow you to download epubs from the My Library page. You know, the place this thread is all about.

[lkmiller]

Kobo is apparently still connecting books to the new library interface. Several of the books that were missing, which I wasn't able to add back myself, have now appeared. And I hadn't contacted Kobo about them yet. The difference between my old and new libraries is now only 7 books. Still checking against what I have in calibre just to be sure.

I've noticed books from Kobo getting updates when I've redownloaded. But I'm sure they don't always for whatever reason. It would be nice if they let you know (as Amazon does). The one time I had a serious formatting issue, I emailed both the author and the publisher. I could see from online previews at other stores that only Kobo had the messed up version. Both author and publisher apologized, and I was emailed a correctly formatted copy. I don't know if they ever got Kobo to fix their version.

[MacEachaidh]

Originally Posted by Alpha o

Exactly. Thank you

My intent was primarily a response to the implied assertion that newer is per se better, and "should" be used because it's ... newer!

I don't have any problem with the new Library, since I find it functional and easy to navigate, and I'm sure it'll be fine once the bugs are weeded out. I do think it should have been pre-announced, though, not least for the books-in-Trash issue, since Kobo has had enough of a presence on these threads surely to know that that's what people were doing.

[Alpha o]

The button to add the book I had a problem with to the Kobo was grayed out. Then it redownloaded the vaporware copies with no extension that you had to read in the Kobo Desktop. The copies that got downloaded with the update didn't matter as the original books were elsewhere. I feel sorry for the Sony converts.

In fact, it started updating before I could do anything else. I think the last book I bought was in January. Desktop reader disabled since.

I dislike any of the proprietary readers. I usually disable the Kobo desktop on Windows anyway unless I need it to download a book.

Whatever works for a person is the best thing. "One man's meat is another man's poison"
If everyone else loves the bells and whistles of Calibre, that's fine - long may they enjoy them.

Just recognize the fact that some don't agree and quit trying to convert.

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by Alpha o

The button to add the book I had a problem with to the Kobo was grayed out. Then it redownloaded the vaporware copies with no extension that you had to read in the Kobo Desktop. The copies that got downloaded with the update didn't matter as the original books were elsewhere. I feel sorry for the Sony converts.

The button to send the book to the device was disable because the kepub version of the book was alread on the device. To get the epub version of the book is a completely different process.

In fact, it started updating before I could do anything else. I think the last book I bought was in January. Desktop reader disabled since.

Yes, Kobo software and firmware is rude and insists on updating at the first opportunity.

I dislike any of the proprietary readers. I usually disable the Kobo desktop on Windows anyway unless I need it to download a book.

Personally, I rarely use the Kobo desktop application. The only reason I have used it in the last month or so was to try and work out what your problems with it was.

Whatever works for a person is the best thing. "One man's meat is another man's poison"
If everyone else loves the bells and whistles of Calibre, that's fine - long may they enjoy them.

Just recognize the fact that some don't agree and quit trying to convert.

I have never tried to convert you. But, I did try to help you when you seemed to be asking for help. As you pretty much ignored all my suggestions, I realise now that you just wanted platform to complain on. Now, all I'm trying to do is counter the FUD you are spreading.