Touch The Case of the Unreadable Book

[denysm]

A veritable mystery!

I loaded about 60 epub books on to my new KT using Calibre (in batches to be on the safe side. Every one showed in Calibre as loaded to "Main". Disconnect from the computer - one book is missing, and I know that this book is readable in both Adobe DE and the Calibre reader.

Connect back to the computer - the book is now not shown as loaded in Calibre, but Windows Explorer shows it there, and it is still readable in Adobe DE. I have tried all of the following tricks to produce new versions of the book, all of which were still readable on the computer but won't show up in the Kobo library:

-Load by copying with Windows Explorer.

-Edit the file with Sigil (minor edit but it means the book gets recompiled).

-Convert epub to epub with Calibre (added metadata to ensure file was changed).

-Convert to rtf file with Calibre to get rid of all the auxiliary files, clean up with Word, and use Atlantis to re-create a totally new epub file.

-Convert to mobi with Calibre, then use Calibre to load this to the Kobo doing an automatic conversion.

There is nothing special about this book - it's only a hundred pages, no graphics, special fonts, etc.

Anyone got any ideas why a book can be so stubborn, or what else I can try to get it readable? As you might guess, at this point, it's not about reading the book on the Kobo (I could have read it on the computer in the time I've spent trying to solve the problem), but I do not like being beaten by a pair of dumb electronic devices. And if it happens again, I'd like to know what causes it and what to do about it.

Thanks for any input. Who's going to take up the challenge?

[Asawi]

WHen I was playing around with a Kobo Touch and had a similar problem I deleted the two calibre files (don't remember their names, but they had something with "calibre" in the extension as I remember it, and they showed up nicely in my regular file explorer), deleted the book file and reloaded it, but didn't involve Calibre that time.

This was not using the latest firmware, but probably 1 or 2 versions back.

[moffattm]

One little thing to keep in mind when reloading ebooks is that if you delete an ebook file on the Kobo then you should disconnect the Kobo from your PC and let it update its database before you load the ebook back onto the Kobo. If you delete an ebook and reload it without letting the Kobo update its database inbetween then the Kobo doesn't see it as a new book and won't process it.

[Pistos]

@moffattm: That's not necessarily true. Just this weekend, the library book I was reading expired. Unless my memory is fuzzy about my order of operations I believe I: hooked my KT up to a laptop, fired up ADE, deleted the expired library book, reborrowed the same book, downloaded it with ADE, and dragged it to my KT, then unmounted my KT from Linux. The book is visible and just fine. I was just reading a few pages of it today.

[moffattm]

Originally Posted by Pistos

That's not necessarily true.

Maybe Kobo has changed this behaviour for the Touch, but it used to be a problem on the Original and WiFi models.

[thp1017]

Deleting a file via ADE, or Calibre, is probably different than deleting a sideloaded book - I know for sure that for sideloaded books you *do* need to delete, unplug, replug, then re-add. ADE and Calibre I think are probably updating the database right away?

As far as books not showing up - I actually had a problem for the first time last week, after no problems with ~450 books. I added a couple of books by P.C. Hodgell, and dropped them all in a new directory, "Hodgell, P.C." - turns out the periods in the folder name prevented the KT from finding and processing the new books. Changing the folder to "Hodgell, PC" fixed the problem completely.

Any chance something like this, either in the folder name, file name, title, etc, might be causing the problem? I know I've written software myself that didn't always take weird formatting of filenames and folders into account - the extension is always everything after the *only* period in the filename, right? Who would do something weird like have more than one?

[Latch]

I'm sure I've had that issue in the past where a dog's breakfast of periods, commas, apostrophes, etc in the book title screwed up the indexing. Renaming the file fixed the problem.

[PeterT]

Originally Posted by thp1017

ADE and Calibre I think are probably updating the database right away?

To the best of my knowledge, neither Calibre or ADE do any deletions from the database on the Kobo when an ePub is removed.

[denysm]

Well, I finally got the book recognized, but I'm not sure why. Perhaps the main reason for success was the wait of a few days after deleting it, and loading a few other books in the meantime. The folder and file names were straightforward - no non-alpha characters.

Anyway, thanks for all the feedback - filed in the back of my mind for next time it happens!