Need help importing my books collections from my kobo reader into my computer

[Captain_85000]

Hello,

I bought (second hand) a Kobo Touch device about 2 years ago.
Right after buying it, I opened it and changed the internal SD-Card. The 'original' one was a 2Go card, I replaced it with a 32 Go card. Of course, I cloned the first one on the second one. And everything has been working perfectly fine for the last 2 years. My kobo reader is almost full (yes, I know, I'm crazy, so what ?), no problem there, I'm perfectly happy.

I use Calibre to convert my ebooks into .kepub files (the prefered format for kobo readers) and to get them into the reader.

Having A LOT of books, I organized them (inside the kobo reader) by using Collections. Most of those collections are just a sub-directory of one particular author, but not all. Some are a group of authors, other are a series or a group of series, and so on. I know it's a mess, but it's my mess and I like it this way.

However, about 2 weeks ago, my kobo reader began having strange reactions : I can't access my collections anymore, the reader just reboot itself each time I try to get into a one, or change one, or add a book into one. I can still read books, I can still search them by names, but I can't access my own personal books organisation. It's very, very annoying. I'm beginning to think that my reader may be close to its death, the poor thing, and that it's time to buy a new one.

But all my books are in my reader. I need to get them back so that I can transfer them into a new reader (when I will have bought one).

Getting the ebooks back is not really an issue, I can just get them through Calibre. It even automatically convert .kepub files into .epub files. No problem there. Except that I don't know how to get the organisation (the collections) that I spent 2 years building into my kobo reader.


So, 1/ How do I get the collections from my kobo reader into my computer ?
and 2/ Once it's done, how will I get those collections into the new reader that I will buy ? (or first into my current kobo reader after having reinitialised it, just to give it a try).

I think that there is a way to do that automatically, using Calibre's virtual libraries. I'd like to have a way to "tell" Calibre to create a virtual library in my computer for each collection it finds in my kobo reader (I really, really, really don't want to do that myself... I have SO MANY collections, so many books....). And then, of course, I'll need a way to "tell" Calibre to create a new collection into my new ebook reader for each virtual library in my computer.

I don't know how to do that, could someone help me ??? PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE, I'm willing to get on my knees if needed.

I'm not sure that the virtual libraries solution is the right one, so I will listen to any suggestions you might have.

Finally, I hope that this post is understandable. English is not my first language, it was not that easy to write such a long text in English, so if somethinh is not clear don't hesitate to ask for clarification. Thank you all.

[davidfor]

You need to add the books to your calibre library from the device, and then fetch the collections using the Kobo Utilities plugin. Someone asked a similar question in the Kobo forum recently. Have a look at that and come back and ask any questions you need to clear up.

For getting the collections into calibre, my Kobo Utilities plugin has a function to fetch the collections into a column in calibre. You can then use that column with the collection management options in the KoboTouch or KoboTouchExtended driver to set the collections on the new device.

[Captain_85000]

Thanks a lot, I will try the plugin