Ebooks on SD Card Don't Appear in Calibre

[Jewitch]

I'm a free & cheap ebook slut, so I had to add an SD card to store ebooks that "overflowed" my Kobo Touch.

The new SD card (Maxell 8 GB micro) works with Calibre; I can transfer books to it but they don't show up in my Calibre library the way ebooks on the device do, so I can't keep track of which ebooks I've transfered to the card until I unplug the card from the computer, & plug it into the Touch..

Honestly, I don't know if it's Calibre or the SD card. I was having lots of trouble with a SanDisk SD card & the customer care kids at Kobo suggested there might be an incompatibility problem.

Here's the 'problem': after a recent update to my Touch, most ebooks on the SD card showed up as a generic book icon rather than the covers; the next update made the icons disappear so I had blank space rather than covers or icons. After consulting with the Kobo team. I switched SD card brands. Now about 75% of ebooks showed up on the Maxell card with covers (compared to less than 10% on the SanDisk). The rest show up as blank space or empty rectangles. The problem is with Kobo ebooks as well as with format conversions & ebooks from sites other than Kobo.

Since I started to use the new SD card at the same time as the most recent Calibre update, I'm not sure which is the problem. However the problem exists whether I use Calibre & the Touch/ SD card with Win Vista, Win 7, or Linux Ubuntu.

Any advice is greatly appreciated. Thanks for listening to me whine.

[MartyTX]

I have a Nook, not a Kobo. Nooks also have problems with covers not showing up for SD card sideloaded books. For the Nook, the fix is to use Calibre to re-convert EPUB to EPUB. Delete the book from the SD card that doesn’t have a cover, then add the re-converted book.

Do you attach the Kobo to your PC with the SD card in it, or do you remove the card and put it directly into the PC’s card-slot? I leave the card in the Nook, and Calibre has no problem recognizing it. I get an icon for the “Device” and an icon for “Card A”. Click the Device icon and you see only the books in internal storage; click “Card A” and you see only the books on the SD card. Do you see both icons when you attach the Kobo to the PC?

SD cards have a “Speed Class” (1,2,4,6,10) with the higher numbers faster. For most eReaders a class-4 is fine; higher speeds are needed for devices like HD-Camcorders. I use a 4-GB capacity Sandisk with a Class-4 speed-rating and it works fine. If the card does not show a number in a semi-circle, it’s probably a golden-oldie speed-1 … IMHO too slow.

Hope some of this Nook stuff can help with your Kobo.

[davidfor]

Jewitch,

My Kobo Touch and calibre work with the two different SD cards I have. One is a 1GB Sandisk, the other a 4GB Kingston. The latter is a class 4 card, I don't know about the 1GB. I have tested both with firmware 1.9.17 and 2.0.2.

I have seen a lot of mention of problems with the Touch and SD cards. But, they always seem to be that the Touch can't handle them. I can't think of a post saying that calibre couldn't get to the SD card when the Touch was connected. But, I can think of a reason that calibre wouldn't display the books.

The Kobo driver in calibre doesn't look at the actual books to display them in the lists. It looks in the database on the Touch and a file called metadata.calibre that calibre creates. If a book is not in these places, it will either be missing from the lists, or will have incomplete information. This can mean the book is on the device list, but isn't matched against the book in the library.

If the Touch is having trouble with a book, or the card, then books might not be in its database. The way they get there, is that you put a book on the card or main memory, disconnect the Touch and then it processes the books adding any it hasn't seen before. If this goes wrong, for any reason, the book and any that are after it (I don't know what order they are processed) will not be in the database. If you reconnect the Touch and start calibre, only the books that were processed correctly will show in the device list. So, missing books could be because of a corrupt book or a problem with the Touch reading them from the card.

How to prove which is the problem? Only trial and error. Try a different card or different books. Putting the same books in the main memory of the touch and seeing if they are added to the Touches library, that will eliminate them as the problem. But, if only some go in, it is trial and error to work out which one.

The images are probably a related thing. With firmware 1.9.17, the Touch generated five images for the cover when it first processed the books. If this failed, or the images were removed, you would see the default book cover. I suppose this could happen if the Touch could extract the metadata it needs from the book but couldn't extract the cover. I suppose a performance problem reading the card could cause this.

With FW 2.0.x, the cover images are generated on the fly. I frequently see a default cover (just the title and author) displayed for a few seconds and then replaced by the actual cover. I don't know what happens the Touch can't generate a cover image from the book or if the image became corrupted in some way.

With both firmware's, you can get calibre to upload the cover. But, this only works if the Touch has the book in its database and has generated the images. In these circumstances, calibre will replace the cover when you upload the book again to the Touch.

Unfortunately, I'm not sure if any of this helps. Things I can think to try are:

- Copy over the books to the SD card in small batches and disconnect the Touch for each. This gives the Touch a chance to process them in batches and that might help. But, this means you can't pull the card out of the Touch or it will "forget" about the books and reprocess them when it is inserted. And you are back where you started.

- With the Touch connected, but calibre not running, delete the files "driveinfo.calibre" and "metadata.calibre". If this is out of sync with what is actually on the card, it could cause a problem. Calibre will rebuild these files when started and it sees the Touch, but it might not show that a book on the Touch matches a book in the library.

[Jewitch]

Thanks for your advice.

Today I did the 8.65 Calibre update & now most (but not all) of what I put on the SD card are checked off in the Calibre library. However, where an ebook put on the "device" is checked off as soon as it's done loading, stuff on the card don't get 'checked" until after I close & restart Calibre.

Marty, in Linux & Win7 I leave the card in the Touch. One suggested 'cure' from Kobo Customer Care for the card problem was to load it only when the card was seperated from my Touch. It didn't make any difference that I could see so I leave the card in the Touch when using Win7 & Linux. However, Win Vista won't load the card if it's in the Touch so I have to take it out. I suspect that's because I've abused my poor 5 year old desktop so much by screwing with partitions & installing, deleting, & reinstalling Linux.

I will try reinstalling re-converted ePub ebooks. I've read that Kobo ebooks can't be installed on SD cards, which was a surprise because I've always been able to do that by using Calibre to suck an ebook off my ereader, then transfer it to a card.

David, the process of transfering books is working better since I transfer them in small batches rather than a couple of hundred at a time. Also, sometimes just reinstalling an ebook again (sometimes a few times) means it (eventually) shows up with a cover picture. Occasionslly it's not the cover I bought it with but a different one. I have the most trouble with pictures I apply to converted articles from periodicals or covers I change. Kobo reprocessing content each time I plug in the card is a minor annoyance as long as the ebooks don't disappear off the card.

One thing that puzzles me is that a format conversion shows up (in both Kobo & on the card) in the original format, in ePub, & with a jpg image of the cover. I was able to stop jpg images by ticking a Calibre box, but have to delete the original format one at a time manually.

Thanks so much for your help. I really appreciate it.

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by Jewitch

Today I did the 8.65 Calibre update & now most (but not all) of what I put on the SD card are checked off in the Calibre library. However, where an ebook put on the "device" is checked off as soon as it's done loading, stuff on the card don't get 'checked" until after I close & restart Calibre.

Strange, for me it is the opposite. When I put them on the card in calibre, they show up. Stop calibre, and open it and they aren't there. This is expected. Until the device is disconnected and process the books, they won't appear in this list. This is because the list is built from the database on the Touch.

When I disconnect the Touch, let it process the files and reconnect, the list is still blank. When I run calibre in the debug mode, I get a lot of errors with timestamps in the wrong format. That doesn't make sense as I can see timestamps in the database and they are the same format for both the main memory and th SD card records.

I will try reinstalling re-converted ePub ebooks. I've read that Kobo ebooks can't be installed on SD cards, which was a surprise because I've always been able to do that by using Calibre to suck an ebook off my ereader, then transfer it to a card.

Are you talking about kepubs? If so, I couldn't pull one of these off the device. And I am pretty sure that calibre doesn't handle them at all. If you have the DRM protected ePub versions of the books, then they probably can be copied to the library.

David, the process of transfering books is working better since I transfer them in small batches rather than a couple of hundred at a time. Also, sometimes just reinstalling an ebook again (sometimes a few times) means it (eventually) shows up with a cover picture. Occasionslly it's not the cover I bought it with but a different one. I have the most trouble with pictures I apply to converted articles from periodicals or covers I change. Kobo reprocessing content each time I plug in the card is a minor annoyance as long as the ebooks don't disappear off the card.

So what cover is it getting? The Touch uses the first page of the ebook as the cover. It isn't actually extracting an image from the file, but it builds the first page and creates an image of that. The epub spec has a way to say exactly where the cover is in the book, but from my playing, this isn't respected.

One thing that puzzles me is that a format conversion shows up (in both Kobo & on the card) in the original format, in ePub, & with a jpg image of the cover. I was able to stop jpg images by ticking a Calibre box, but have to delete the original format one at a time manually.

Are you looking at the library in the Touch or inside calibre. You can put multiple versions of the same book on the Touch and have them in its library. Calibre should only send one format, but if you change the drivers configuration of what formats get sent, them you could end up with multiples.

In calibre, if you want to delete the original formats, select the format you want to get rid of in the tag browser. Select all the books and click the down arrow next to the delete button. Select "Remove files of specific format from selected books". On the dialog, select the format you want to get rid of and press OK.