Kobo forma battery drains within hours after sideloading books from Calibre. Kobo says it is database corruption due to bad sideload.

[Glenn Funamoto]

Kobo Forma battery drains within a few hours, not weeks as advertised.

Kobo support says it is database corruption due to bad sideload.

Kobo Forma was factory reset, software updated, books reloaded from the Store. Battery drain problem is gone.

Running Calibre 3.42 on Windows 10 on Dell laptop

[Kovid Goyal (kovid)]

Changing the component for this bug.

 assignee davidfor
 tag kobo-driver
 status triaged

[David Forrester (davidfor)]

Did Kobo tell you how they determined the database was corrupted? Or did you see this when connecting the device to calibre?

If there was a corrupted database, then yes, it can cause higher battery drain. A factory reset is one way to deal with this. But, signing out of the Kobo account would probably have fixed it.

But, unless you have direct proof that the database was corrupt, it is more likely to be a specific book. There are plenty of reports that opening some books will cause the battery to be drained. This us usually caused by bad code in the book causing errors in the background processing. When this happens, restarting the device will stop the battery discharge until the book is reopened. The real fix for this situation is to remove the book from the device and fix the errors in the book.

To be able to determine if there is a problem cause by calibre sending a book to the device, we would need to see an example book.

If this happens again, please check the state of the database. This can be done using the Kobo Utilities plugin. And determine which book is causing the problem. We can then look at the book to try and see what the error is.