Sony PRS-T1 in Calibre

[jackie_w]

Originally Posted by Kolenka

Sorry, force of habit. I've e-mailed back a couple questions in response to your mail. Let me know when you can get to them.

email sent

[kovidgoyal]

Originally Posted by Kolenka

That was working a couple days ago on my box, looks like a change broke something on 10/10:

"Device drivers: Add a prepare_addable_books API method"

I don't see any reason why it should break this driver specifically. Kovid, any insight?

Mea culpa. Silly typo related to a change I made for the Kobo driver. For the moment adding from device to library is broken, fix is now committed.

[trevgriff]

Here's a strange occurrence, bug I experienced.

The first time I tried the new beta all of my collections were doubled, but one of the double collections would be empty and the other duplicate would have the books in it.

When I deleted a empty collection, sometimes the full collection would also get deleted.

I then deleted all the books and re-transfered them to the sd card via calibre and no collections at all.

I then re-formatted the sd card and still can't get collections to show up.

Wish I could be of more help, I'm sure the final version will be fantastic as always.

Situation resolved:

Everything appears to be working. What I did was re-formatted the sd card then transferred using the sony software. Then another re-format of the sd followed by transferring the books using calibre. Now it appears to be working.

[jackie_w]

@Kolenka,

I have been doing more testing with the plugboard.

As I mentioned in last night's email, a "mysterious event" occurred yesterday evening (possibly the full reboot of the T1???). Since then the plugboard data is 'sticking' every time

The only plugboard setting I'm using is:
device_db:PRST1 = ([{author_sort}{series:| - | }{series_index:0>2s}] -> authors)
which should give a more useful result when sorting all books by author.

This is mainly working correctly. The only occasions when it isn't are when

1. there are multiple authors e.g.
   The Gathering Storm by Robert Jordan & Brandon Sanderson, book 12 in the series Wheel of Time
   plugboard should set author to
   Jordan, Robert & Sanderson, Brandon - Wheel of Time 12 - The Gathering Storm
   but actually truncates to
   Jordan, Robert
2. the series contains an ampersand e.g.
   Black Dog by Stephen Booth, book 1 in the series 'Ben Cooper & Diane Fry'
   plugboard should set author to
   Booth, Stephen - Ben Cooper & Diane Fry 01 - Black Dog
   but actually truncates to
   Booth, Stephen - Ben Cooper

Just for interest, I sent a 3rd book to the PRST1, whose Title contained an ampersand. There was no problem at all with this book.

Is it the T1 which doesn't like the ampersands or is it a problem with the plugboard/template language? I assume the former because the same plugboard works correctly on my PRS650 with all 3 books.

I'll have to read up on the template language to see if there is some fancier code I can use in the plugboard to replace '&' with something more T1-friendly.

[Kolenka]

The T1 normally only uses the first author out of multiple authors. The driver only takes the first author as a result normally. I can change the driver to use the authors string as set though.

[Kolenka]

As a note, looks like the timestamp issue is quite a bit more complicated than it looks at first blush.

- After a shutdown of the reader: It will reload, undo all my plugboards, and set the modified_date to be local time (after it was UTC)
- After an unplug of the reader: If it undoes my plugboards, the modified_date is set to be GMT/UTC (after Calibre sets it based on local time)
- Sometimes after an unplug: it will set the modified_date back to local time.

Some very inconsistent behavior there.

[jackie_w]

I've done a couple of shutdowns today. I didn't lose any plugboard info.

[Kolenka]

Well, that's expected if the timestamp is in the right time zone.

If the T1 updated it to UTC, then shut down... It'd relaunch, wipe out my data. If it was local time the whole way through it is fine.

Since I feel like I'm going nuts, I can't really investigate all that well.

EDIT: I'm also noticing that there are some arbitrary limits in the sorting that the T1 can do. Instead of letting the SQLite DB sort for it, it does sorting, and places character limits on fields in the process. Author is pretty short being something like 32 characters. Anything longer will be seen as 'identical' if the first ~32 characters are the same. File path has similar limitations in collections, but not in the books view. Awesome bugs Sony.

[trevgriff]

Originally Posted by trevgriff

Here's a strange occurrence, bug I experienced.

The first time I tried the new beta all of my collections were doubled, but one of the double collections would be empty and the other duplicate would have the books in it.

When I deleted a empty collection, sometimes the full collection would also get deleted.

I then deleted all the books and re-transfered them to the sd card via calibre and no collections at all.

I then re-formatted the sd card and still can't get collections to show up.

Wish I could be of more help, I'm sure the final version will be fantastic as always.

Everything appears to be working. What I did was re-formatted the sd card then transferred using the sony software. Then another re-format of the sd followed by transferring the books using calibre. Now it appears to be working.

[jackie_w]

Originally Posted by Kolenka

EDIT: I'm also noticing that there are some arbitrary limits in the sorting that the T1 can do. Instead of letting the SQLite DB sort for it, it does sorting, and places character limits on fields in the process. Author is pretty short being something like 32 characters. Anything longer will be seen as 'identical' if the first ~32 characters are the same. File path has similar limitations in collections, but not in the books view. Awesome bugs Sony.

Hmm, I may need to review my plugboard completely. Is there a char limit on the Title field, as well?

I had noticed slightly 'wrong sorting' in the "all by author" special Collection, but then I realised that you had removed references to it (and "all by title") from the PRST1 Device Interface plugin, so I thought maybe it wasn't supported at all.

I have also started to send-to-device with books selected in the correct sequence. So far they have sorted correctly, but it may just be luck.

[Kolenka]

Well, it may not entirely be a hard character limit, but instead of sorting as part of the query to the DB (the smart thing), it seems to be doing it's own sorting which doesn't match up correctly. So if I sort by author, it sees "Author - Series Series_Index" as the same as long as the Author part is the same. I haven't looked at the title side of things yet.

And no, the T1 driver doesn't support the "All by Author" and "All By Title" collection at this point. Because the T1 uses the same sorting on all collections, it didn't seem useful at the time. If you have the sort set to anything other than "Added Order", then it isn't actually sorted the way the collection says it is.

[mreo]

Just received my PRS-T1 and download Calibre version 0.8.21 but it does not recognize it. 3 drive letters for the device show up on my pc running Windows XP. What am I missing? I do not see a T1 plugin, only a SONY Device Interface 1.0.0.

Thanks,

[azxswq]

mreo: I believe you have to download the beta version for now.
http://calibre-ebook.com/downloads/betas/
Is that where you are downloading the calibre? Kolenka, Chaley and Kovid are still working on the beta, they periodically compile into this beta release.

I do have a stupid (or relatively simple) question... I had 10 news sources from calibre setup for my T1, they used to be periodicals, but now they are all categorized as books. (I think I prefer them to be periodicals, for better management.) Is it because I need to download more than 1 day's worth? (I was doing a lot of formatting and deleting to test the beta...)

Thank you in advance for your help.

[Kolenka]

Periodicals aren't yet supported by the driver.

The problem right now is this:
- Periodicals written using something other than the Sony output profile, will show up as a periodical on the device, but it will just not open. If the device is told it is a periodical.
- If the Sony output profile is used, all is good, but parts of the periodical UI don't work. No article/section navigation buttons, just Table of Contents. The Section name doesn't appear at the top of the screen either, it is just empty space.
- The driver needs to detect the feed and tell the Sony it is a periodical, which isn't happening, but can be fixed in the driver easily enough, using the same detection as with earlier Sony devices.

Now, if people want it under periodicals, even with the limitations/bugs, I can turn it on and submit the patch to do it. But it won't quite be as nice as on the earlier devices until Calibre's Sony output profile is updated. And I don't know how long that will take, or if I even want to attack that problem.

[Robert22]

When I was first testing "series" with the new driver, I was somewhat disappointed that the collection that contained the series did not have it in the right order when sorted by "Author", which is what I expected. But after checking all the sort orders, it was in the proper order when sorted in the "Date Added" order. Going back to the "Author" sort and looking at it carefully, the authors sort was actually in the date added order. This was fine since I will keep whatever sort gives me the actual order of the series.

I added books of a series in random order; deleted some books in a series; unplugged, replugged then added them back in and the above behavior persisted.

When I read the last few posts I revisited the series that I tested previously. Since then I have shut down my reader completely several times and added many new books.

Now the "Date Added" and "Author" sorts are both in the same (and correct) order, for these series.

The point to all of this is that I am still using the same driver/version of the beta that I used when I tested the series initially. At some point, processing, probably by the T1 but maybe by Calibre, changed the "Author" sort from first being by date added order to the actual series order. And you should be aware of this when testing. The "Date Added" sort, unexpectedly, was always in the right series order, and that is the one I'm sticking with. I don't know whether it was by shutting down the device or adding more books or plugging and unplugging to the PC that caused the change with the "Author" sort, and I don't really care.

The only plugboard I use adds the published date to the title in parentheses and changes the authors from first name last name to last name, first name.

In any case it works and I'm happy...