New Colorsoft Owner - Lotsa Questions

[Brian007]

OK, this is my first post here in some years. The new Colorsoft got me back into using an ereader. Now I am confused because a lot of stuff I used to know seems to be no longer valid. Google is a joke for this sort of thing as asking a question shows very old stuff no longer valid of course. So....

1) I finally got Send to Kindle working. The main reason I bought the Colorsoft is I have many cbr files of very old PD color comic books or ones I purchased. I use kcc to convert from cbr to epub. But many of the ones I want to setup on the new Colorsoft for next season's beach expeditions are larger than 50 Megs and fail in send-to-kindle. Thank you, Amazon.

3) I went to Calibre. I was able to convert reconvert cbrs (thank you Kovid) to ePubs and Calibre does upload them to the Colorsoft ok. But without the covers. And the process takes a bit of time. Is there a way to batch process a collection of files? But, the main problem if I do it that way is that I cannot send them to the cloud library so it is only on the Colorsoft. But I know there is some sort of fix for the cover thing?

4) Is there any way to bypass using Send to Kindle and place the ePubs larger than 50 Megs in your Amazon cloud library?

5) I suppose there is no way to get the Colorsoft to simply read cbr files? That seems quite an oversight?

6) Way back when I used the Kindle paperwhite I just simply dropped mobi files (I guess such are now fossils) into a directory. Can I simply do that with the converted ePubs? And ending with a stupid question, I forgot how to do that and the directory structure seems a LOT different than it used to be. Where would I put the ePub files? Thanks and good to be here.

[axu2]

You can use kcc to convert to mobi and just usb transfer the files by dropping them into the documents folder. Has sharp covers. It’s mobi extension but it’s also azw3

Send to Kindle website has 200 mb limit for EPUBs if you prefer. Will have slightly blurry covers.

CBR/rar is a tricky format to support for various license and technical reasons.

[Brian007]

I will try the mobi trick, thanks. On the web send either kindle still seems to not wanna epub greater than 50 tho. Is there some sort of preference that needs setting/

[Frogm4n]

Are you actually using the Send to Kindle website, or one of the apps/plugins or email? Over email has a 50 mb limit (also app limit IIRC) vs the 200 mb of the actual website.

[Brian007]

Yep, that was one of my mistakes. Turns out I thought I was using the web page but it was a link to the send to kindle app with a 50MB limit. I am still having tremendous problems though and have invested a good number of hours and simply cannot get it to do what I want. What I am trying to do is to upload preferably to the library comic books with their covers intact and designed to reappear whenever you leave the reader on their icon. I have tried so many ways that I am losing track. One of the problems I think is that I cannot get kcc to work reliably as I cannot install the 7K (or whatever it is called) as the installation instructions use the Mac terminal program and other hacker tools that are simply not my baliwick!

So the tools I have that I can use are Calibre, Send to Kindle (both web and app) and have also had luck with the Zamzar.com file converter which has a major drawback in time to use.

Please, can you explain to me if I can with the above tools turn my .cbr files into files that I can upload with Send To Kindle that all have cover icons and not generic ones? It just cannot be as impossible and frustrating as I am finding it to be!

Hope you or anyone can help with this. I am very close to returning the Colorsoft and staying with a Pocketbook brand with a much inferior screen as it simply says "Cbr? No problemo!")

[axu2]

Just type these three lines into macOS Terminal to install 7z for KCC:

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"

brew install p7zip

brew install unar

Do you have the setting to display covers on sleep screen in your kindle settings?

[Brian007]

Welllll this happened:

Error:
homebrew-core is a shallow clone.
To `brew update`, first run:
git -C /usr/local/Homebrew/Library/Taps/homebrew/homebrew-core fetch --unshallow
This command may take a few minutes to run due to the large size of the repository.
This restriction has been made on GitHub's request because updating shallow
clones is an extremely expensive operation due to the tree layout and traffic of
Homebrew/homebrew-core and Homebrew/homebrew-cask. We don't do this for you
automatically to avoid repeatedly performing an expensive unshallow operation in
CI systems (which should instead be fixed to not use shallow clones). Sorry for
the inconvenience!
Failed during: /usr/local/bin/brew update --force --quiet
==> Downloading https://formulae.brew.sh/api/formula.jws.json
################################################## ####################### 100.0%
==> Downloading https://formulae.brew.sh/api/cask.jws.json
################################################## ####################### 100.0%
Warning: p7zip 17.05 is already installed and up-to-date.
To reinstall 17.05, run:
brew reinstall p7zip
Warning: unar 1.10.8_4 is already installed and up-to-date.
To reinstall 1.10.8_4, run:
brew reinstall unar

It looks to me as if P7 and unar whatever the heck they may be are already installed???

[Brian007]

[QUOTE=Do you have the setting to display covers on sleep screen in your kindle settings?[/QUOTE]

Uh no, that was also going to be a question. i no longer see the crrent book cover although I did before. I am truly beginning to dislike this device. Sigh.

[axu2]

Yea looks like everything is installed. What’s the problem with kcc mobi then? Make sure to restart your Mac.

I just convert to mobi, drop it into kindle scribe documents folder, and enable sleep covers in
Settings > screen and brightness > show covers on lock screen

[Brian007]

Do I need to do something with kcc to make it recognize the other installation?? On the bright side I did get the covers showing.

[axu2]

Originally Posted by Brian007

Do I need to do something with kcc to make it recognize the other installation??

can you screenshot the problem you have with KCC right now? I'm not sure what your issue is.

[Brian007]

OK, I think I have a handle on this now. It seems that kcc is seeing some of my cbr files as corrupt and those are what it is failing on. But the thing is that I can read the files with two or three cbr readers without any problem. And Zamzar and Calibre both convert them. Trouble is that is a lot slower than using kcc. But, at least it will just be having to do 20 or 30 at the slow pace. Sorry but kcc was marking them as having been corrupt files. Here is the error dialog on one
Error during conversion /Volumes/External1 1/COMICS/Dell Giant Walt Disney/Walt Disney's Christmas Parade 003 [Dell].cbr:

Image file /Volumes/External1 1/COMICS/Dell Giant Walt Disney/Walt Disney's Christmas Parade 003 [Dell].cbr/WD_Xmas_Parade_3_Dell_092.jpg is corrupted.

Traceback:
File "kindlecomicconverter/KCC_gui.py", line 291, in run
File "kindlecomicconverter/comic2ebook.py", line 1164, in makeBook
File "kindlecomicconverter/comic2ebook.py", line 893, in detectCorruption

But how corrupt could such a file be if every ereader that takes cbr is reading them without a problem? (YAC, Comic Zeal, Panels, etx.)

Thanks for your help! Happy Holidays!!

[axu2]

Could try downloading a separate unarchiver app like The Unarchiver from App Store.

Use The Unarchiver to extract CBR to a folder of images.

Use that folder in KCC directly.


If it still gives an error, send that problematic image

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by Brian007

But how corrupt could such a file be if every ereader that takes cbr is reading them without a problem? (YAC, Comic Zeal, Panels, etx.)

Thanks for your help! Happy Holidays!!

Easily possible. Like most modern browsers that do their best to display broken HTML/CSS, most image renderers will attempt to display a corrupt file. One recent example my daughter had was a manga that showed patches of pixelation on some of the pages but there were no complaints from the three viewers she tried. When I looked at the files by opening them in several image editing tools, they all complained the files had issues.