Calibre will only send one book to kobo

[baileye]

Hi,
I am a complete newbie. Everytime I try to add books to my kobo, calibre will only send one. If I try to send another, it will delete the first one.
I messed with my settings ages ago to try and make it so I had bookshelfs based on the column 'genre', but this only happened when I updated my kobo. I thought maybe it would get fixed when Calibre updated, but it didn't.

I know nothing about personalizing calibre and every time I've done anything I had to follow a tutorial, but now I can't download books and I have no idea how to fix it!

Please help!

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by baileye

Hi,
I am a complete newbie. Everytime I try to add books to my kobo, calibre will only send one. If I try to send another, it will delete the first one.
I messed with my settings ages ago to try and make it so I had bookshelfs based on the column 'genre', but this only happened when I updated my kobo. I thought maybe it would get fixed when Calibre updated, but it didn't.

I know nothing about personalizing calibre and every time I've done anything I had to follow a tutorial, but now I can't download books and I have no idea how to fix it!

Please help!

At a wild eyed guess, you have your send to device template set to send every file with the same filename. Check the first page of the KoboTouch or KoboTouchExtended driver. See the attached image.


The full template I use isn't visible in that image so I'm pasting it here.

eLib/{author_sort:sublist(0,1,&)}/{title} - {authors:sublist(0,1,&)}

Basically, the root directory for my books is eLib. Inside that is a directory based on the author sort (first author name only) and then the ebook with the filename created from the title and the first author name. So something like The Ickabog by J. K. Rowling would show up as:

eLib/Rowling, J. K_/The Ickabog - J. K. Rowling.epub

A multi-author book such as The Wizard of Karres by Eric Flint, Dave Freer and Mercedes Lackey would show up as:

eLib/Flint, Eric/The Wizard of Karres - Eric Flint.epub

This has no effect on how your Kobo would list the book.

The first author names were due to issues with some anthologies where the multiple authors caused the path & filename to become too long.

[JSWolf]

I highly disagree with subdirectories such as author based subdirectories because eventually you'll end up with a lot of empty subdirectories. I don't mind book or elib as a directory to place all the books. I have my template when sending to my Kobo as...

books/{{author} - {series}{series_index:0>2.1f| | - } {Title}

That create one subdirectory that will always have books in it. I will not end up with multiple empty subdirectories. Now if say Kobo Utilizes has the ability to search a directory tree and remove empty subdirectories, that would be different.But it doesn't so I don't want empty subdirectories.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

I highly disagree with subdirectories such as author based subdirectories because eventually you'll end up with a lot of empty subdirectories. I don't mind book or elib as a directory to place all the books. I have my template when sending to my Kobo as...

books/{{author} - {series}{series_index:0>2.1f| | - } {Title}

That create one subdirectory that will always have books in it. I will not end up with multiple empty subdirectories. Now if say Kobo Utilizes has the ability to search a directory tree and remove empty subdirectories, that would be different.But it doesn't so I don't want empty subdirectories.

How are you getting so many empty directories? For the most part, I use calibre to add and delete books from my Kobo ereaders and when I remove the last ebook from a directory using calibre, the directory is deleted as well. That is something that you can easily test.

On a more philosophical note, why do you object to empty subdirectories? It's not as if they consume a mass of storage space. I'm never going to have over 65,534 authors in my calibre libray so I am unlikely to reach the maximum number of directories and I am even more unlikely to reach 268,435,437 files which is the maximum number of files on a FAT32 partition.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by DNSB

How are you getting so many empty directories? For the most part, I use calibre to add and delete books from my Kobo ereaders and when I remove the last ebook from a directory using calibre, the directory is deleted as well. That is something that you can easily test.

Not everyone deletes all eooks using Calibre. I don't. I do sometimes, but not always.

On a more philosophical note, why do you object to empty subdirectories? It's not as if they consume a mass of storage space. I'm never going to have over 65,534 authors in my calibre libray so I am unlikely to reach the maximum number of directories and I am even more unlikely to reach 268,435,437 files which is the maximum number of files on a FAT32 partition.

Because I find that all the empty subdirectories to be sloppy and annoying. Do it my way and you have the root clean and all the books in one directory.

[PeterT]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Because I find that all the empty subdirectories to be sloppy and annoying. Do it my way and you have the root clean and all the books in one directory.

I rarely look at the file system on the Kobo so don't care if there are unneeded directories

[theducks]

Why are you using a folder-file system on a Kobo anyway? It uses a Library manager and AFAIK does not expose the FS to the devices user.
Or have you rooted your Kobo?

FWIW Quality check PI has a FIX item that KiwiDude put in to cleaned up my old EZReader wich did use a prettified FS bookshelf

[DNSB]

[QUOTE=theducks;4015877]Why are you using a folder-file system on a Kobo anyway? It uses a Library manager and AFAIK does not expose the FS to the devices user.
Or have you rooted your Kobo?

I don't think you can root a Kobo since that seems to be an Android concept. OTOH, the Linux system running on a Kobo is open which is what makes it so easy to patch. Kobo also allows user access to the database which makes a lot of operations (collections, series, subtitles, Ghod alone knows what else).

The file placement dates back to before I started using calibre since I prefer not placing all my books in the root directory. I simply carried over my directory structure when I started to use calibre since calibre by default would place all ebooks into the root directory. Given that virtually all my ebooks have long filenames, it is relatively easy to run into the limit on the number of directory entries in a FAT32 partition. The eLib/author-sort/ helps to turn that possibility into an improbability while trying to avoid running into the path length limit. A quick check on my Clara HD which was modified to have a 32GB uSD card shows that if I placed all my non-fanfic ebooks in the root directory, I would be using 57,437 directory entries out of a max of 65536. Adding in the fanfic ebooks would break the system whether I tried placing them in the root or in a single subdirectory.

The FAT32 partition is exposed when you connect via USB and with a bit of work, you can telnet to your Kobo and have fun with all the partitions.

For those who have not already been bored to tears, a LFN entry takes a minimum of two directory entries and a maximum length 255 character LFN would use 20 directory entries. So a FAT32 root directory can have at most 32,768 LFN files and with all names at the maximum length, you could only have 3,276 LFN files. Subdirectories start subtracting from the maximum LFN length due to path length limitations.

[JSWolf]

If you run out of space in your designated directory such a books, just create a new directory called books2 and use that to start loading books.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

If you run out of space in your designated directory such a books, just create a new directory called books2 and use that to start loading books.

Or just continue using my current setup and not worry about running out of directory entries. Using calibre to delete books leaves no empty directories so you can stop whinging about them.