[GUI Plugin] Kobo Utilities

[ecorbett]

Hi Phil, when they initially disappeared from the main toolbar, I re-added them but didn't realise there was the separate option for the main toolbar when device is connected ��
now resolved thanks!

[ecorbett]

ok... now kobo utilities is accessible again, I've used it to pull the shelves / collections on the device

fyi one of the collections on the device is excluded from being automatically amended when the device is connected

I wanted to start this collection again from scratch, as there were nearly 200 books in it I deleted the collection on the device, then re-created it. on the device the books previously in the collection no longer show in the re-created collection. however when I pull the shelves from the device all the old books are still listed in calibre as being in that collection.

(fyi if I add a book to the re-created collection on the device, pull the shelves, then subsequently manually delete from the collection on the device and re-pull shelves it updates correctly in calibre.)

does anyone have an idea how to resolve? I don't want these old books noted in calibre as being part of this collection.

TIA x

[davidfor]

The shelf fetch only makes changes to books that are currently on shelves. It gets the list of books that are on shelves on the device and updates the column in the library with those values. You should probably clear the column from all books before doing the getting the shelf list.

Exactly what you should do depends on what you are actually doing. The get collections function was not really intended for frequent use. The main use case was to get the collections from the device after some sort of disaster in the calibre library. When that happened, the user could get the collections from the device and use that to update the columns that they use to do the collection management. Then they would turn on the collection management and continue from there.

[GravityJones]

Originally Posted by davidfor

I have just finished checking in a change for this in the KoboTouch driver...
This will be in the next calibre release. I will add this to the plugin sometime soon.

Thank you! I really appreciate all the work you put in, and the attention you pay to requests in this thread.

[Minotaur]

Howdy.
I doubt this is an issue with KoboUtilities itself, but I'm not really sure where to ask. I notice that when I send a book to my Kobo Forma via Calibre, it doesn't have the series info present after I disconnect the device. I need to reconnect/disconnect again before series info shows up. Is this normal behaviour, or am I missing an option somewhere to fix this?

[ownedbycats]

I think it's normal. I also have to plug in a second time to get my custom subtitles/collections to update on the device.

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by Minotaur

Howdy.
I doubt this is an issue with KoboUtilities itself, but I'm not really sure where to ask. I notice that when I send a book to my Kobo Forma via Calibre, it doesn't have the series info present after I disconnect the device. I need to reconnect/disconnect again before series info shows up. Is this normal behaviour, or am I missing an option somewhere to fix this?

That is how it works. The device can read some metadata. That doesn't include the series info. So, the driver can update the metadata in the database on the the device. But, it can only do that once the book has been imported and added to the database. Hence the driver updates the database with any differences between the library and the device each time it is connected.

So, send the books to the device, eject and let them get imported and then connect again.

[mbovenka]

Originally Posted by Minotaur

Howdy.
I notice that when I send a book to my Kobo Forma via Calibre, it doesn't have the series info present after I disconnect the device. I need to reconnect/disconnect again before series info shows up. Is this normal behaviour, or am I missing an option somewhere to fix this?

That's normal behaviour. Calibre can only update the entry in the Kobo database when it's already there, and it gets created only when your Kobo imports the book after the first eject. Subtitles are the same way.

One of our resident Kobo wizards (@geek1011) has written a small library to set the series & subtitle info on first import, so that the reconnect is no longer neccessary: NickelSeries

[ecorbett]

thank you for the reply!

just a quick note to advise I deleted the shelf in the kobo collections column in calibre and this fixed the issue (even when I pulled shelves again to test it didn't re-pull the old shelf/collection info against the books in question).

[pricciar]

Hi All,

I'm back again with the same problem as last time. I have finished a book on the device and even after it has updated every time I plug in Calibre thinks there has been a change in the reading position.

This time I plugged in. Updating the reading position on 3 books. 2 finished. I shut down Calibre without disconnecting the device. When I started Calibre back up one book (Record of a Spaceborn Few) was shown as having a reading position change. The other two books had no change.


I have a simple workaround (delete the book.) But, I thought I'd share the log in case it sheds any light on the situation. I sent you a message, David with the log attached.

And, interestingly, when I looked at the logs from when it happened last time the book that this is happening to was listed directly before the book it was happening to last time. This is probably just a coincidence, but I thought I would mention it anyhow.

Thanks.

pat

[ownedbycats]

Originally Posted by davidfor

It shouldn't be. I have done this in the past, but, I've just realised the recent times was to put an updated position on another device, but, I hadn't actually opened the books to check. And in these cases, the books were not changing.

But, I have just tested and am probably seeing the same problem. I used FFF to download just the first chapter of a two chapter book and sent it to the device. Then I opened it and went to the last page. Then I used FFF to download the rest of the book. After connecting the device and resending the updated book, I had a look at the generated kepub and the span numbering wasn't what I expected. Which means the bookmark position stored would not have matched the same place in the book.

The extended drive adds the spans around each sentence. They are numbered from the beginning of each file. The number increases for each paragraph (headings and some other tags count as a paragraph) and then sentence inside the paragraph. So, "kobo.471.1" means paragraph 471, sentence 1. Every time I have looked at this past, the paragraph number starts at 1 for each internal file. But, for this file it isn't. But for this book, the number is starting somewhere else. I checked a couple of books I sent earlier (not FFF created books). One does start at 1 for each file, the other doesn't. It looks like it is creating unique numbers across the whole book. I have a vague memory of some discussion of doing this, but, I didn't think it was done. I will have to have a look at the driver to work out what is going on.

And, I can be very pedantic. But, only when it suits me.

I figured out a solution to this sort of. Since FFF always uses the same filenaming scheme, I can manually set the bookmark to OEBPS/file####.xhtml#kobo.1.1 with the number being +1 from the chapter I left off. I did this manually for a few fanfics that actually didn't have bookmarks (before I switched to reading exclusively on Kobo) and worked as expected.

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by ownedbycats

I figured out a solution to this sort of. Since FFF always uses the same filenaming scheme, I can manually set the bookmark to OEBPS/file####.xhtml#kobo.1.1 with the number being +1 from the chapter I left off. I did this manually for a few fanfics that actually didn't have bookmarks (before I switched to reading exclusively on Kobo) and worked as expected.

I would expect that to work. And you probably don't need the fragment. Just pointing to the correct file will probably open it at the start. I think I have tried that in the past, but, possibly for a epub, not a kepub.

[ownedbycats]

I added a template to increment the number (and reset the spans to 1.1) to my "Mark as Read on Device" action chain (sets #read and #percentread, then restores bookmark with status change so it appears as 'finished' on Kobo).

At this point the bookmark points to a location that doesn't exist yet, but I don't predict anything unexpected will happen unless I try to re-open the book again before it's updated. If there are, I'll just use "set reading status" instead.

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by pricciar

Hi All,

I'm back again with the same problem as last time. I have finished a book on the device and even after it has updated every time I plug in Calibre thinks there has been a change in the reading position.

This time I plugged in. Updating the reading position on 3 books. 2 finished. I shut down Calibre without disconnecting the device. When I started Calibre back up one book (Record of a Spaceborn Few) was shown as having a reading position change. The other two books had no change.


I have a simple workaround (delete the book.) But, I thought I'd share the log in case it sheds any light on the situation. I sent you a message, David with the log attached.

And, interestingly, when I looked at the logs from when it happened last time the book that this is happening to was listed directly before the book it was happening to last time. This is probably just a coincidence, but I thought I would mention it anyhow.

It looks like I was mishandling the location. This changed a while ago for epub and it appears I had one place that I had changed it everywhere except here. The attached beta should fix this.

There are some other changes in this beta:

• Change: Change how books are queued when automatically fetching reading locations.
• Change: Sort the results when getting the reading locations.
• New: Choose colour used for letterboxing in covers.
• Fix: Fix handling of epub locations for recent firmware.

The change for the cover update uses function in calibre version 5.12. If you are using an older version of calibre, there will be no change in the cover upload.

[pricciar]

Perfect! That fixed it.

Thank you!

pat