How to feed a Kobo with thousands of books?

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

if you just send the eBooks to the Kobo without making sure they are formatted in a way that works for you, then you have a lot of eBooks that you won't like the way they look.

I check the formatting on the books when I add them to Calibre. So I already know they will look fine on my devices (except maybe the Nook ST. That one is so old it has trouble with combined margins in the CSS).

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by ZodWallop

I check the formatting on the books when I add them to Calibre. So I already know they will look fine on my devices (except maybe the Nook ST. That one is so old it has trouble with combined margins in the CSS).

Yeah, same. I edit the formatting and metadata before loading anything on my devices.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by Mingyar

why does one want to do it?

Because I can? It's my ereader and I'll put as many books on it as I feel like.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

And if you just send the eBooks to the Kobo without making sure they are formatted in a way that works for you, then you have a lot of eBooks that you won't like the way they look.

Jon, I tend to massage metadata and covers, edit the CSS and rather often some of the text file contents to fit my preferences before the first time I send an ebook to one of my ereaders. I do use several Sigil plugins to do some of the heavy lifting but for the most part, I've developed a workflow that reduces the time spent to ~5 minutes per book. For me, it's worth the time spent.

I will admit that I do have a rather large collection of saved searches.

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

If the eBook has a pBook version, the cover is the image used for the pBook cover and not some bland cover used when the publisher isn't willing to use the real cover image.

It looks much better having a proper cover image when viewing covers.

When it's an older book, I like to go find the old, painted covers.

[Bembo]

Hm, I've been having an issue with my device database recently. After every issue, I use a working backup to reset the configuration files. After, when I send books sometimes the import results in there being < X + Y books. Would the step 6 as described here help with that? It seems like that is what keeps giving me a fatal database error...

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by DNSB

Jon, I tend to massage metadata and covers, edit the CSS and rather often some of the text file contents to fit my preferences before the first time I send an ebook to one of my ereaders. I do use several Sigil plugins to do some of the heavy lifting but for the most part, I've developed a workflow that reduces the time spent to ~5 minutes per book. For me, it's worth the time spent.

I will admit that I do have a rather large collection of saved searches.

I also edit my eBooks before I send them to my Kobo. I find if the formatting is not good enough, then I'll feel like I'm reading a book instead of getting involved in story.

Paragraph spaces are one thing that can throw me off if they are large enough. No indents also is a no go. Same with fonts that are smaller then they should be (main font less then 1em).

I find it doesn't take all that long to clean up most eBooks. But some do take longer as they are more of a mess (code).

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

I also edit my eBooks before I send them to my Kobo. I find if the formatting is not good enough, then I'll feel like I'm reading a book instead of getting involved in story.

Paragraph spaces are one thing that can throw me off if they are large enough. No indents also is a no go. Same with fonts that are smaller then they should be (main font less then 1em).

I find it doesn't take all that long to clean up most eBooks. But some do take longer as they are more of a mess (code).

Or the idiots who set the main font size to .8em and the line height to 150%. If I want to read something that looks like it's double spaced, I'll play with the slider.

There have been a few books where I've just blown away the CSS and replaced it.

[DrunkenDonkey]

I'm quite shocked by this topic, as this is exactly the way I prefer my reader (currently kindle pw2, jailbroken) and was exactly looking into switching to kobo for its easy loading of custom readers. I currently have indexing disabled on the kindle, the whole library exported into a folder structure of [Genere]/[Author]/[Collection]/[Books] and all it takes is copy-paste to the device and be done with. Since kobo is much more open than amazon, I expected it will be even easier to do it - disable indexing and load all you want...?

[Mingyar]

The Kobo system manages books through a database. Any book placed in the Kobo that is not referenced in the database does not exist.
So there is an indexing necessary if you take a Kobo and stay on the native system. To my knowledge, it's not possible to inhibate indexation.

[DrunkenDonkey]

Thanks, on a lookout for a new reader then, glad this topic saved me from a costly mistake

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by DrunkenDonkey

Thanks, on a lookout for a new reader then, glad this topic saved me from a costly mistake

One note is that indexing on a Kindle is not the same as importing on a Kobo. Unlike a Kindle which reads the entire book to be able to search on all books whether open or not, a Kobo imports the supported metadata and generates the cover/thumbnail images. It's one heck of a lot faster than indexing on a Kindle.

For those who are enthused, you can also use KOReader or Plato which do not use a database though KOReader will use calibre's files to allow searching.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by DNSB

Or the idiots who set the main font size to .8em and the line height to 150%. If I want to read something that looks like it's double spaced, I'll play with the slider.

There have been a few books where I've just blown away the CSS and replaced it.

I've never fully blown away the CSS but I have rewritten a number of classes.

I remove all/most of the line height as it's not needed. Also, I do not like when the base font size is set to something smaller then 1em.

[DrunkenDonkey]

Originally Posted by DNSB

For those who are enthused, you can also use KOReader or Plato which do not use a database though KOReader will use calibre's files to allow searching.

Thanks, this is curious then KOReader can (on kindle) and Plato unknown to read directory structure so... can you like upload a whole folder with thousands of books somewhere on the device where the basic indexing will not catch it, thus will not trigger, but KOReader/Plato will be able to browse it just fine, that kind of solves the issue?

[frostschutz]

the database is maintained by the original firmware/reader (kobo nickel) if you use koreader or plato instead that is entirely unrelated (provided you don't use the original at all)

and yeah you can set nickel to ignore certain locations... though it's slightly more complicated than it used to be, nickel no longer ignores hidden dirs by default