Syncing takes forever

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by GeoffR

In Calibre, go to: Preferences --> Plugins --> Device interface plugins --> KoboTouch --> Customise plugin

and tick the "Show Recommendations" box. Then connect the device and click the "Device" button to get the view of books on the device.

If you scroll down you will see the ones marked as recommendation in the "Collections" column. You can select and delete them.

There is a quirk in Calibre: if a recommendation has the same title/author as a book on the device then it doesn't show it as a recommendation, but instead shows as a second copy of the book. You can tell which copy is the recommendation by looking in the size column, the recommendation will have size zero (or close to it). You can delete those ones too.

With some information supplied by GeoffR, I found the bug. What GeoffR describes, happens if you don't have a shelf column defined in the driver configuration. ie. If you don't manage the shelves from calibre. This affected all books on the device that were in the current calibre library. The device list wasn't showing the shelves from the device or the reading status in the collections column.

I have fixed this and it should be in the next calibre release.

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by taming

I wonder if the Kobo Utilities plugin could have a setting to remove recommendations, much like it can be set to remove unwanted tiles.

The two choices on how to do this are to delete the recommendations or mark them as "not interested" in the same way as on the device.

The delete would work the same way as deleting them from the device list, so there wouldn't be a point to add it.

Marking as "not interested" is a bit harder. I had a look at this a while ago, and what is done in the database depends on where you do the marking on the device. Doing it from the recommendation list is different from doing it from the "Related reading" for a book.

[taming]

And I guess there is a difference between related books and recommendations, with related books (at least from what I can tell) being far more numerous than recommendations. I don't know if that makes a difference, David.

[GeoffR]

Originally Posted by thepossum

Bad news for me -- I used the current version of Calibre, and removed 500+ "Recommended" entries from my database. Upon my next sync, my Glo locked up and needed a pin reset. After trying to sync again, same thing. And again.

I wonder if something has changed in the latest firmware? I hadn't done a delete of recommendations since upgrading to 2.8.1, but when I did, the first sync after deleting them got "stuck" in the loading content phase. It didn't lock up though, I was able to cancel the sync and the next time it worked fine.

I didn't mention before, but I don't actually delete all the recommendations, I leave the most recent ones and just delete the old ones. I figure that if I delete all the current recommendations they will just get downloaded again on the next sync.

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by taming

And I guess there is a difference between related books and recommendations, with related books (at least from what I can tell) being far more numerous than recommendations. I don't know if that makes a difference, David.

Yes, if you buy any books from Kobo, there will be a lot more related books than recommendations. From what I can see, what I show in the calibre device list as recommendations fall into several categories:

- Related Reads - between 5 and 10 per kepub.
- Recommendations - 20 for your account.
- Top 50 - Should be 50, but I seem to have only 20. And right now, I can't find how to display it. But there seems to be a tile for it.
- Something else - I can see another category, but don't know how it is displayed.

I'll have a look at it again and see how hard it will be to do something.