Updated Kobo driver in Calibre 0.7.5

[timlegge]

Hi

The Kobo driver that I have been working on is now in the latest version of Calibre.

There are not a lot of changes since the last plugin version that was out there. Most of the changes are a code cleanup.

However, for those who noticed that the driver took 10-30 seconds to get the book list from the device the query has been improved and should be less than a second (the device recognition and metadata still take a few seconds but it a huge improvement over the 20-30 seconds that I saw on some systems).

So to review the features:

1) Lists the kobo, epub and pdf books on the device
2) Allows you to CLEANLY delete kobo, epubs and pdfs.
3) Removes images files from the device when books are deleted.
4) Allows most other Calibre features for epubs and pdfs

Future Plans:

1) Allow kobo books to be exported to the disk.
2) Updates for version 2? of the Kobo firmware

BTW, I stress clean deletes above because as many of you have noticed, deleting an epub manually does not cleanup the database. I don't have any features in this version of the driver to cleanup the device. If I get time (and the interest I may look into it at some point)...

Tim

[plaid]

Seems to be working great, major increase in speed of detecting the book list on my Kobo. A couple of notes:
- people who used the beta plugin need to remember to turn it off and turn on the new plugin.
- I'm not sure if this is a new issue with this driver, but many of my pdf files on my sd card just show unknown as the title. I think they used to show the file name if a title was not defined within the pdf? I think this is what should happen and I'm pretty sure that at some point I wasn't seeing so many "unknown" files on my card.

[SensualPoet]

Just so I am clear -- I can delete, selectively, any Kobo book included one or more of the "100 free books" ... but there is no facility to copy them, selectively, before deleting? This is a one way trip to oblivion, in other words.

Thanks -- at this, it's a huge improvement over "delete ALL the 100 free books forever".

[plaid]

Actually, there seems to be more of an issue here with pdfs. The items marked unknown (there are around 50 or so in my list) give this error if I click to open them:

ERROR: ERROR: Unhandled exception: <b>AttributeError</b>:'int' object has no attribute 'row'

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "site-packages\calibre\gui2\actions.py", line 1251, in view_specific_book
File "site-packages\calibre\gui2\actions.py", line 1285, in _view_books
File "site-packages\calibre\gui2\library\models.py", line 1075, in paths
AttributeError: 'int' object has no attribute 'row'

[plaid]

Ok, a few more issues:
I cannot launch the viewer for anything pdf or epub that is on my device, only if I am in the library tab can I launch the viewer. I get the same error I mentioned above, no attribute 'row'.
Also, many of my books no longer have a color image for the book cover, just black & white.

[RedRoverJ]

Yeah. I noticed that all of the cover images on my Kobo show up as black and white in Calibre, however, the covers in my library show up in full color. Not really a big deal since the Kobo doesn't do color anyway. However, if the images are actually in black and white that might be a downer for copying titles back to Calibre from the Kobo.

[timlegge]

Originally Posted by RedRoverJ

Yeah. I noticed that all of the cover images on my Kobo show up as black and white in Calibre, however, the covers in my library show up in full color. Not really a big deal since the Kobo doesn't do color anyway. However, if the images are actually in black and white that might be a downer for copying titles back to Calibre from the Kobo.

Strange. I made a change a bit ago to shot the color image. I am pretty sure they display for kobo books I forget if imported pubs have color images. The driver just displays the images on the device. It makes no attempt to parse the pub for the original image

Tim

[timlegge]

Originally Posted by plaid

Seems to be working great, major increase in speed of detecting the book list on my Kobo. A couple of notes:
- people who used the beta plugin need to remember to turn it off and turn on the new plugin.
- I'm not sure if this is a new issue with this driver, but many of my pdf files on my sd card just show unknown as the title. I think they used to show the file name if a title was not defined within the pdf? I think this is what should happen and I'm pretty sure that at some point I wasn't seeing so many "unknown" files on my card.

Can you disable the new drive and let me know whether the issue was in the previous plugin. SD card processing caused me major greif this past week. I don't think I tried more than one PDF on the SD card though.

Oh well more bug work.

Tim

[timlegge]

Originally Posted by SensualPoet

Just so I am clear -- I can delete, selectively, any Kobo book included one or more of the "100 free books" ... but there is no facility to copy them, selectively, before deleting? This is a one way trip to oblivion, in other words.

Thanks -- at this, it's a huge improvement over "delete ALL the 100 free books forever".

Exactly. If you have any desire to keep a kobo book around in the future copy the database to your computer first. You can always rebuild your pub and PDF library. Don't forget to backup the images as well

For testing purposes I have downloaded a few free kobo books that are not in the original library. That way when I delete them I can always get a new copy

Tim

[timlegge]

Originally Posted by plaid

Ok, a few more issues:
I cannot launch the viewer for anything pdf or epub that is on my device, only if I am in the library tab can I launch the viewer. I get the same error I mentioned above, no attribute 'row'.
Also, many of my books no longer have a color image for the book cover, just black & white.

I will take a look later today. I was pretty sure that that worked fine. Is it only related to the books on the SD card or main memory as well?

Tim

[timlegge]

Originally Posted by timlegge

I will take a look later today. I was pretty sure that that worked fine. Is it only related to the books on the SD card or main memory as well?

Tim

Okay as I thought this works fine for me in my environment. I will try on windows and Mac...

Tim

[timlegge]

Originally Posted by timlegge

Strange. I made a change a bit ago to shot the color image. I am pretty sure they display for kobo books I forget if imported pubs have color images. The driver just displays the images on the device. It makes no attempt to parse the pub for the original image

Tim

As I thought. The driver displays the iPhone images from the device. For kobo books that is a color image. For the imported pubs and PDFs that is a black and white image. The driver only displays what is in the .kobo/images directory. You should be able to confirm that then files are all black and white for your imported PDFs and epubs. I may look at replacing the file with a color pic but there are some complications related to that...

Tim

[aarion81]

Just used the new Kobo driver to delete all of 100 free books. I hated having that trash on my reader. Took about 15-20 mins, since the Kobo books were hardwired into the device I guess, but I couldn't be happier with my reader now, thx to the Calibre folks.

[fred_yu_job]

I like those (at least some of) books!
Classic books will never be garbage!

[HarryH]

Is it possible to remove the current version of Calibre . in particular the config file so as a clean install can be installed

And can one create their own reader material and convert it to the eReader format ???

Harry in NS