Kobo Wifi not accepting any more donations

[meandher57]

Sorry for the long winded post...

I haven't been using Calibre for a while, simply because it seemed to take forever to load the metadata file to my Kobo. This morning I decided to clean up a couple of ebooks I had downloaded without covers.

Calibre prompted me to download an update, which I did. Plugged in my wifi Kobo and suddenly some sort of error message appeared. Didn't quite catch it, but a yellow exclamation mark (!) error symbol also showed up in my system tray. Disconnected, reconnected, and couldn't access any of the books on the SD card. Clicking on the icon for the SD card brought... nothing.

So I disconnected and let the Kobo reboot. It took forever to go through the "updating" process, even though I hadn't actually changed anything. Half an hour later, it finally finished that process but anything I had previously saved on the SD card wasn't showing up. Rebooted again.... same half hour procedure... and still none of my new books showed up.

When it finally came back up a 3rd time, I moved all the books off the SD card and reformatted it.

Side loaded two books back into it (drag and drop)... took a few minutes for it to add new content, but the two new books never did show up.

I have done the two click reset... and the paperclip reset... and neither has helped. I am afraid to do the factory reset because then I might lose not only the 400 books that are still on the Kobo's main memory... but if the factory reset doesn't do the trick, then I may never be able to add any books back.

Any profound thoughts?

(at least I still have 400 books to read....)

UPDATE: Discovered last night that my Kobo wouldn't remember what book I was reading... or what page I was on. So I ended up doing the factory reset. Seems to be functioning but when I sideloaded a few epubs onto my SD card, they never showed up on the Kobo menu. ALSO... the option to show "only my books" is greyed out for some reason.

FURTHER UPDATE: Last night I managed to add a few epubs to the main memory. This morning, I can't duplicate that feat. Added new books... they don't show up. Tried putting them on the freshly reformatted SD card... they don't show up in the Kobo.

[jackastor]

stop using calibre to side load books and manage things on your kobo and the problems will most likely disapear.

[meandher57]

Not sure if it was calibre or not...

Right now it appears to have been a corrupt epub.

I have reformatted the SD card... and done a factory reset (twice) on the Kobo... and am very slowly adding things back in. So far... no problems. fingers crossed.. knock wood... etc.

[PeterT]

Originally Posted by jackastor

stop using calibre to side load books and manage things on your kobo and the problems will most likely disapear.

Jack; I really wish you would get off your high horse regarding calibre.

Please remember.. calibre does NOTHING different than you would do using either Windows Explorer, or a command prompt; ie, it makes use of only standard Windows API calls to create files and directories on the Kobo.

About the only difference is that calibre maintains two files for it's own usage; driveinfo.calibre and metadata.calibre. Even these two files are only accessed via standard file open / close / read / write API calls.

[jackastor]

Originally Posted by PeterT

Jack; I really wish you would get off your high horse regarding calibre.

Please remember.. calibre does NOTHING different than you would do using either Windows Explorer, or a command prompt; ie, it makes use of only standard Windows API calls to create files and directories on the Kobo.

About the only difference is that calibre maintains two files for it's own usage; driveinfo.calibre and metadata.calibre. Even these two files are only accessed via standard file open / close / read / write API calls.

That is not the case. It does more then that and once you stop using Calibre to transfer books to the touch The problems will stop.

[twowheels]

That is not the case. It does more then that

Can you explain what it does? I've used it on and off and as far as I can tell that's all it's doing. I haven't looked at the source, but as a software engineer it doesn't appear to me to be doing anything else.

[taming]

Originally Posted by jackastor

That is not the case. It does more then that and once you stop using Calibre to transfer books to the touch The problems will stop.

This has not been my experience either, Jack. A pretty long time ago, Kobo made some changes and there was a week or so before the he changes were reflected in the Calibre-Kobo driver. I don't think there have been any problems since then.

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by twowheels

Can you explain what it does? I've used it on and off and as far as I can tell that's all it's doing. I haven't looked at the source, but as a software engineer it doesn't appear to me to be doing anything else.

While I disagree with jackastor that calibre is the source of all evil with the KT, calibre does do more than what PeterT said. But, the main thing it does will not affect the KT in anyway.

The main thing calibre does when copying books to an ereader is to update the metadata in the book. calibre copies the book over and then updates the metadata.This also means that if you send a modified book (new cover, metadata, content etc) the KT won't do anything with it. When you read the book it will probably be OK (bookmarks might not work) but the KT won't use the update cover, title or TOC if that changed. I have cobbled together a plugin to fix the TOC but not the others.

If you have the sync settings to something other than "Manual Management", calibre can makes changes to the read status on the KT. I don't like the way it does this, so I use "Manual Management".

If you delete books from the KT using calibre, it will remove the book details from the KT's database and the cover images. The latter it might not do correctly as I have just tried a delete and there was an image file left behind. Hmm, looking at the driver source, it doesn't handle the "N3_LIBRARY_SHELF" version of the image.