Problems loading new Kobo Clara from Calibre

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by Marg1780

The older eReader software/firmware only has collections, not series & collections as separate entities.

Any reason for not updating the firmware of the older Clara HD? That will give you the same function on both.

Until a couple of days ago, when I loaded new books that had a series defined in Calibre, a collection was automatically built by Calibre using the series name. I had never noticed that this is a two-step process, as you explained, but it did work seamlessly.

The collections can be created when sending the books. If you were using the series for the collections, that's probably why you didn't notice it.

And now... it doesn't, on my older reader at least. (I'll need to double-check the new one, though I think yesterday's advice got that one working - which again makes me wonder if it's a case of backward incompatibility... I don't see anything about a firmware cut-off level in the Calibre features list, but that doesn't preclude the possibility.)

The driver should support all firmware version that Kobo has put out for all of their devices. It won't try and do something with older firmware that didn't have that function, but, I don't think I have removed any function. The series management is where the last big bit of work was done because of how the Series tab works. But, that's over a year ago. If it isn't working properly with the older firmware, it is a bug and I can look at it. But, I do recommend updating the older device.

As an experiment, I just added 3 books in a new series (SeriesA for brevity) and 2 additional books for a series which already existed on the eReader (SeriesB).

- When Calibre told me they were on the device, I ejected the eReader from Calibre, let it do its processing, then looked at the entries. As expected, each entry showed, for example

SeriesName - 03 - Title [filename format as set up in plugboard]
[the series/collection data is not yet added]
author name

- I reconnected to Calibre, let it do its job processing (which showed no errors), then ejected the eReader again. This time, the missing middle line was filled in

Series Name - 03 - Title [as before]
series name & number now filled in [as expected]
author name

But if I look in the Collections tab, no entry for SeriesA has been created, and the 2 new books are not showing up in the listing for SeriesB.

If I hook it up into Calibre again, and look at "Show book in the main memory of the device", it shows the same thing. For all 5 of the newly added books, the "collections" column is empty. But if I page down to check the series books which were added using Calibre v5.17 (or earlier), those fields contain the series name.

Believe me, I did not create several hundred series-name collections manually - Calibre did it for me transparently, but at v5.33.2 has ceased to do so. And man, I really hope there's just another unknown-to-me parameter that needs flipping, because I'm not looking forward to needing to do it all manually from now on.... (And there are SOOO many potential rabbitholes attached to the thought of trying to upgrade the reader firmware - starting with an image of it deciding that my many-many books are nothing but sideloads and so can be deleted on a whim. Assuming it's even possible to upgrade the reader's firmware without doing a full factory reset?)

All that should work. I need to see a debug log to see what is going on. Can you run calibre in debug mode and connect the device? When the device jobs have finished, close calibre and the debug log will be shown. Post the log for me to look at. Or upload it somewhere and send me a PM with the link to it. I can usually see what is going wrong from that.

[Marg1780]

Originally Posted by davidfor

Any reason for not updating the firmware of the older Clara HD? That will give you the same function on both.

Sheer fear of getting myself into a worse mess, since I'm feeling around blind, trying to fill in the information gaps. Would I lose all the books on the reader? (Their annotations, bookmarks etc that is.) The only way I know to accomplish an upgrade would be factory reset and reinstall with the Kobo app, which would be a royal pain. If there's an alternative method, I'd happily embrace it.

Originally Posted by davidfor

The collections can be created when sending the books.

Could you point me at information on how to set that up? That's exactly what I want - autogeneration of collections which are named using the Calibre series field. According to my notes, I didn't need to set anything for that when I installed my first unit. Aside from defining one line in the plugboard page, the default choices Calibre made worked for me very nicely.

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by Marg1780

Sheer fear of getting myself into a worse mess, since I'm feeling around blind, trying to fill in the information gaps. Would I lose all the books on the reader? (Their annotations, bookmarks etc that is.) The only way I know to accomplish an upgrade would be factory reset and reinstall with the Kobo app, which would be a royal pain. If there's an alternative method, I'd happily embrace it.

Upgrading firmware should not cause any problems. If it does, you would probably hit a similar problem soon. It doesn't need a factory reset or anything like that. Just turn on WiFi and sync. Or use the Kobo desktop app or manually put the update on the device.

Could you point me at information on how to set that up? That's exactly what I want - autogeneration of collections which are named using the Calibre series field. According to my notes, I didn't need to set anything for that when I installed my first unit. Aside from defining one line in the plugboard page, the default choices Calibre made worked for me very nicely.

There are instructions in https://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/Kob...nd_Collections. They use series as an example.

[Marg1780]

Okay, and many thanks for all the help.

Once I've gotten through the new issue that decided to show up this morning - when I tried to start Calibre, it threw up an unhandled error for a missing python library (python-lib.bypy.frozen) - I'll see what I can do. I don't think I've ever seen Calibre crash before - or at least it hasn't "within living memory" as the saying goes. It's always been a wonderfully stable program. ... Off to do an app delete and cross my fingers a reinstall will do the job. (There was a python related issue during the upgrade to 5.33.2, but there was already a thread on here for that one.)