Libra 2 Transfer of library of books

[davidrichards27]

Hi Guys!
I have had my Libra2 for a couple of years now and suffice to say I have 'lots' (a few thousand)of books, many, many sideloaded and organised into lots of collections.

I am going to be upgrading to a Libra Colrour soon and I am wondering if there is a simple way to just mirror my existing collections straight onto the new reader without having to replicate every collection manually?

Any ideas gratefully received

Thanks a lot

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by davidrichards27

Hi Guys!
I have had my Libra2 for a couple of years now and suffice to say I have 'lots' (a few thousand)of books, many, many sideloaded and organised into lots of collections.

I am going to be upgrading to a Libra Colrour soon and I am wondering if there is a simple way to just mirror my existing collections straight onto the new reader without having to replicate every collection manually?

Any ideas gratefully received

Thanks a lot

It's not an upgrade to a Libra Colour if these books are just text. For B&W text, the Libra Colour is about 20-30% darker then the Libra 2.

Do you have all of these eBooks in calibre?

If you do, it's an easy solution. You would need to use Kobo Utilities to pull in your reading positions. Also use Reading List to mark which books are on your Libra 2. You will need to configure some custom columns for this.

You can then put all of those eBooks on your Libra Colour, and push the reading positions.

You will lose any annotations.

[Quoth]

The Libra Colour only adds 150 dpi colour and has poorer mono resolution than a mono only 300 dpi panel and a darker screen with less contrast because each pixel has a printed coloured dot in it (not covering it entirely). It's also very poor colour.

Because of the insistence of having a 300 dpi mono mode there are artefacts in mono. There should only be 150 dpi mode, perhaps that's what the anti-rainbow setting does. But because the colour dots don't fully cover the pixels (so as to mitigate darkness), you can get a kind of grid artefact anyway.

So the only real upgrade is the pastel to shades of murk colour, about 4000 including grey or greyish shades, compared to 32,000 PC high colour, 16,700,000 "true colour" or even more on HDR screens,

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

You can then put all of those eBooks on your Libra Colour, and push the reading positions.

You will lose any annotations.

Yes, though the annotations can be saved to the computer, just not written back to another Kobo.

[Cootey]

Originally Posted by davidrichards27

Hi Guys!
I have had my Libra2 for a couple of years now and suffice to say I have 'lots' (a few thousand)of books, many, many sideloaded and organised into lots of collections.

I am going to be upgrading to a Libra Colrour soon and I am wondering if there is a simple way to just mirror my existing collections straight onto the new reader without having to replicate every collection manually?

Any ideas gratefully received

Thanks a lot

It’s not easy. Kobo has very poor sideloading sync support. If all you did was borrow library books through Overdrive or purchased directly from Kobo, then this is as simple as logging into your new device and authorizing the different services. But you had to go and sideload thousands of books and group them in collections…just like a lot of us. LOL

In the past, you could make a backup of your Kobo (I use a terminal shell in macOS and type “cp -rv /Volumes/KOBOeReader/* (destination)”) then reverse the paths and restore the backup onto the new device.

However, Kobo has changed a few things with the firmware on the new Colour devices. I ran into problems when I copied my old Clara2E backup onto my new Libra Colour (KLC).

If you just dropped your books onto the mounted Kobo drive when sideloading, just open up your Kobo drive and move all those sideloaded books into a backup directory. Then you can drop them back into the KLC. Or if you use Calibre, you could give all the books a unique tag to make copying them over to the new device easy.

Backup your conf (configuration) files in /Volumes/KOBOeReader/.kobo>Kobo. Those can be copied back to your new device. Backup custom-dict, too, if you have added any.

The problem is the collections. Kobo may restore your collections on the new device (assuming you sync with Kobo occasionally), but they’ll be empty. Kobo doesn’t restore sideloaded books or remember where you so carefully placed them.

You have two options:

1) Manually restore them. I keep a backup of my sideloaded books on my Mac and restore them one collection at a time. It’s time consuming, but I have so much on my plate, I haven’t taken time to learn how to…
2) Use Calibre to organize your collections. Then it can restore them onto the KLC for you. There are more than a few discussions about this very process in the forum.

Every time I think “yeah, I should learn to do that,” I am under deadline, like today. So I‘ll get stuck doing it manually again the next time I have to restore my Kobo. 🙄

[DNSB]

Personally, between using Kobo Utilities to save my reading status and it's ability to restore metadata including using the data added to calibre to set the date added to your Kobo, I don't find it that much of an effort. OTOH, I once used collections in calibre but eventually decided that that they were not that useful so I ended up removing all of the removable collections other than Finished. Most of the collections were genre and series, I found genre almost useless when I had over 1900 in SFF and series died when Kobo started supporting series natively. I also use KoboUtilities backup which backs up the two main databases, version, affiliate.conf, Kobo eReader.conf and the .adobe-digital-editions directory automatically on my first connect of a day.

Yes, it took some time to set this up but given that I was running into more factory resets than the average user, it was worth while.