Libra 2 Question about setting reading position

[michaelbeecham]

Hey all,

I've been really getting into the weeds with Calibre, as I'm sideloading my books now. I have installed, and now using KoboUtilities. There is a book which I knew I was 45% of the way through.

I sideloaded the book to my Kobo, set the reading position in Calibre, and then used KoboUtilities to 'store/restore' the reading position of that book.

When the Kobo had refreshed, it showed me that the book was now at 45%. Success! However, when I opened the book, it opened at page 1 and reset the reading position. My expectation was that, since Calibre had successfully set the reading position of the book, when I opened it, I would open at 45% of the way through, but this did not happen.

Can anyone show me what I'm doing wrong?

[DNSB]

If you send the book as a new book and then open it, this will happen since the new book will have an new import status. If the book was already on your Kobo and you send it with the Do not treat replacements as new books, the reading status will survive. OTOH, if you have made structural changes to the ePub, this will cause issues. My procedure when setting the reading position for an unfinished book is to open the book and manually go to the reading position with the reading position just being a reminder.

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by DNSB

If you send the book as a new book and then open it, this will happen since the new book will have an new import status.

Not necessarily. I've often sent unfinished books to my Kobos again as new books, and restored the reading position in them from calibre. They all open where they should (i.e. where I left off).

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by Sirtel

Not necessarily. I've often sent unfinished books to my Kobos again as new books, and restored the reading position in them from calibre. They all open where they should (i.e. where I left off).

That will depend on that was done to the book while editing. A few minor text edits will be okay but if you modify file names, ToC entries, rearrange files, etc., it's not going to work.

And those items are among what I very commonly do while editing.

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by DNSB

And those items are among what I very commonly do while editing.

Me too, but I do those things before I start to read the book.

Still, we don't know if the OP made any changes to their book at all.

[DNSB]

I tend to load the book to my Kobo after a quick and dirty edit. Often that is enough but if I find errors, I will end up doing a second or third edit pass. This includes items such are merging split files (one publisher that my spouse likes loves to split a letter/note from the rest of the chapter file so you get 3 chunks or more). I also tend to clean up the ToC at this time which again breaks the ability to restore position. For omnibus volumes, I've seldom met one that did not require the ToC to be cleaned up even if for trivia such as giving the books a h2 tag compared to my preferred h3 tag for chapters.

[Sirtel]

I don't do so detailed edits. I don't check for errors, I don't clean the code and I don't rename files or css rules. To me all this is not important - I only care about how the book looks on my ereaders, not how nice the code is. The same for TOC - it must be working, and I only edit it if it's not or is incomplete. As I exclusively use epub2, editing the ncx TOC is simple enough with the TOC editor in calibre.

Sometimes I do merge or split files, and I usually delete some of them, but that is done before reading the book.

[DNSB]

For me, I want the ePub to pass epubcheck or epubveri (habit due to editing ePubs for others) and to look good to my eyes. I am almost exclusively using ePub3 these days with a NCX Toc generated from the navigation document for backwards compatibility.

For most ePubs, my saved search collection in Sigil does 95% of the heavy lifting with minimal effort. One of these days, I'm going to need to document some of the more esoteric searches. I borrowed heavily from others for some of the regex searches and quite a few of them are not obvious at first glance or even a third glance.

[JSWolf]

i do like my code to be neat. I also like my code to pass epubcheck and now epubveri and calibre's error checker. I toss in my CSS and use it as needed and when done, any unused classes get deleted.

I make use of Edit Spans & Divs to remove classes and other things I don't want.

Overall, it doesn't take long to do the edits. What takes longer now is editing KFX. That's because KFX does some rather stupid stuff.

But one thing I've noticed over the many years is some Reader problems are due to eBooks with errors.

And yes, sometimes I have to do things manually.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Overall, it doesn't take long to do the edits. What takes longer now is editing KFX. That's because KFX does some rather stupid stuff.

But one thing I've noticed over the many years is some Reader problems are due to eBooks with errors.

And yes, sometimes I have to do things manually.

I use the From KFX plugin to convert KFX to ePub. It's a lot more consistent in it's output than a calibre conversion. After that I toss my KFX saved searches at it and, for the most part, while the code is not pretty, the rendered text is fairly decent.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by DNSB

I use the From KFX plugin to convert KFX to ePub. It's a lot more consistent in it's output than a calibre conversion. After that I toss my KFX saved searches at it and, for the most part, while the code is not pretty, the rendered text is fairly decent.

I use From KFX. But I still find the formatting can be a bit off.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

I use From KFX. But I still find the formatting can be a bit off.

I didn't say the formatting was not off at times, I said it was more consistent. That makes it easier to fix.

[Sirtel]

KFX formatting sucks because it uses nonsensical class names, and there's no difference in that regard whether you convert or use From KFX.

I always convert my books either before or after editing, even if it's from epub to epub (with modified conversion settings). This removes media queries, consolidates separate css files if there are any and converts inline styles to css styles. So less work for me. Also I use conversion to mass remove some things (hyphenation, widows and orphans) that I always want removed and that would be too tedious to remove manually even with a saved search.

Generally I like calibre conversion, but then I'm not a code purist. Any old code will do for me, as long as I can change it according to my tastes.