Loss collections of ebooks on an SD card

[Michel Corneillier]

I use an ereader Kobo Glo with a 32 gb SD card because I have 3000 ebooks in epub format. When I put ebooks on the SD card, once the ereader offline, 2 bugs occur:

1 - There can be no ebooks from the same collection in both the erader and SD card, those of either disappear from the collection on the ereader (they are not erased from ereader ).

2 - Even if a collection is used only for ebooks on the SD card, as soon as the metadata on the erader is refreshed from Calibre, once erader disconnected, the collection displays 0 ebook, ebooks are more are not refreshed.

The only way to keep a collection of ebooks on the SD card is never refresh the metadata. It's very frustrating and I lose a lot of time to redo a collection of hundreds of ebooks when I lost.

[Kovid Goyal (kovid)]

Changing the component for this bug.

 assignee davidfor
 tag kobo-driver
 status triaged

[David Forrester (davidfor)]

Sorry, from you description, I am not completely sure what you are doing, but I suspect everything is working as designed.

I suppose the questions are:

- How are you creating and managing the collections?

- How are you getting books onto the device?

- How are you refreshing the metadata?

As you say how long it is taking you to create the collections, suspect you are manually creating them on the device. In that case, you should make sure the collection management options in the KoboTouch driver are turned off. The collection management is one way. The books that are in collections are maintained by the driver during the connection. This means that manual changes to collections on the device might disappear when connected to calibre. If you only want to maintain the collections on the device, then you need to make sure the driver doesn't try to do it.

A collection can definitely have books from both the SD card and main memory. I do this all the time when I have an SD card in my Glo. And I am likely to have the same book in both places. Add in the version from the Kobo shop and I am likely to have three copies. They can all be in same collection.

As to refreshing the metadata, strictly there is no way to do this except by deleting the book and sending it to the device again. The Kobo devices process the books the first time they see them and extract the metadata. What happens if you resend the book depends on how you resend the book and if the size changes.

If you manually resend a book and the size does not change, doesn't do anything. But, if the size changes, the book is removed from the internal database and processed as a new book. This means that the new metadata is picked up, but it is removed from any collections it is in, the reading status is lost and any bookmarks will be lost. This is how the firmware on the device works.

Because of this, if you resend a book using calibre, the driver updates the database so that the book is not seen as changed. Hence it doesn't get removed from the device. But, any changes to the metadata or the structure of the book is not reflected in the database on the device. This isn't ideal, but is generally considered better than the above. In this circumstance, to update the metadata in the device library, you can use my Kobo Utilities plugin. It will do this as well as a lot of other things.

If the above doesn't cover what is happening, then I need details of what you are doing. The steps you are using and exactly what you are seeing is needed.

[Kovid Goyal (kovid)]

no followup