[plugin] kobo.koplugin

[OG-Booksmith]

Hello,

I would like to share a plugin I've made that solves a specific use case for me: Using Kobo's native sync to manage books to read on KOReader.

TL;DR, if you use Komga or Calibre-Web, this plugin essentially allows you to only set up Kobo to sync books and progress, while allowing you to open those synced books in KOReader.

There are some more features I would like to add for the virtual filesystem, e.g. respecting the sort decisions and folder by author/series/collection etc. But for now, the concept works and I would like to validate it and see if there are more folks that are interested in this.

So yea, have a look and feedback is always appreciated

Github Repo

[rantanplan]

So this works as long as I configure calibre_web as sync server. Pro: Everything is in sync, but I have to make sure that I don't add Kobo books to my calibre_web database, otherwise I have duplicate books. This also only works at home, otherwise I'd have to expose calibre_web to the internet.

All of it makes sense, as you need a koreader sync server anyway.

Question:
How granular is the reading position synched? Is it by percentage or by paragraph? The reason I'm asking is, if you read longer books, like The Stand, then percentage is pretty much useless for determining a reading position.

[OG-Booksmith]

Regarding duplicate books, that can be controlled with only syncing selected shelfs. You can e.g. have a shelf "none kobo purchased books" that contain all side loaded books.

Regarding reading position sync, I've tried to document the technical reason on on this page. On why syncing to kobo is bound to chapter start.

When syncing to KOReader the last_percent field is set which prompts KOReader to open the book on that percentage.

Komga docs also warn about chapter boundary but I don't think they document why that is. I would need to have a look at their code.

I haven't played around much yet with the reading progress sync, but based on these initial findings, if it becomes known what x.y are in Kobo's DB, and how to map that to KOReader's x_pointer, than we could indeed unlock precision progress syncing.
I suspect the answer has something to do with the HTML inside the epub, and pointing to some specific element in there.

Since syncing from KOReader to Komga is based on chapter boundary, I deemed that using the same concept to sync to Kobo would suffice. As Kobo will sync the same boundary back to Komga. Which would be as if it was KOReader doing the syncing.
With the benefit of Kobo doing it, is a more seamless automatic experience.

Note that calibre-web doesn't support progress sync: https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web/issues/2298