A couple of Onyx Boox questions

[Mr Avid]

I just picked up an Onyx Boox Page and it seems pretty good so far with a couple of issues I haven't figured out how to work around.

Is there a practical way to browse the library on Onyx Book devices? My library has 412 pages of books. If I want to browse around for something to read, it seems pretty impractical to navigate that. Ideally, it would be great if I could browse by series if that was possible.

Also, is it normal for USB transfers to be so slow? It took 30 minutes to transfer less than 200 books. That is orders of magnitude slower than any of my other readers.

Thanks in advance!

[Renate]

There's no reason you can't use your own library app in parallel with the stock library app. I use my own library app. It displays as a list of single lines. When I'm looking for a book I just have to filter by a few letters to find title or author. Your needs may be different.

Some Boox are USB 3 (Poke3), some are USB 2 (Poke5). But it any case they should all be faster. How are you syncing? I use (my own) adbsync.exe and I would expect less than a minute for 200 books.

[Mr Avid]

I am syncing from calibre. That is where I saw the slow performance.

[Renate]

I think that's using MTP. There is a horrible amount of overhead from that.
Are you on Windows? You can try my adbsync.exe (in my sig).
If you have the room, you can just make a new directory on /sdcard and copy your entire library there.
Then you can see how fast it goes and then just delete this whole duplicate directory.

C:\>adb shell
$ cd /sdcard
$ mkdir Test
$ ^D
C:\>adbsync C:\Caliber-whatever sdcard/Test /ascu /s
...
C:\>adb shell
$ cd /sdcard
$ rm -r Test
$ ^D
C:\>

There may be some difficulty in referring to sdcard.
You may have to use "storage/emulated/0/Test" or "mnt/sdcard/Test".
This stuff should be put in a makefile or a batch file so you don't have to remember the details.

What is described above doesn't modify anything on the desktop at all.

[Mr Avid]

Yes, you are right. It is using mtp.

That is annoying. I guess there is no way to fix that?

I am on Linux. I could do something like that but at that point I might as well just use the sdcard reader to copy the library directly to the sdcard.

Hmm....another challenge for the Boox.

Thanks for the pointer though. I think the fact that it is using mtp is definitely the issue.

[Renate]

Originally Posted by Mr Avid

I am on Linux.

I have bunches of utilities that I build for both Windows and Android (ARM).
I'm moving towards writing more platform-agnostic code.
I'm not that fond of Windows, but I'm also not fond of the Ikea method (built it yourself) of desktop Linux.
I like binary distributables.

I don't currently have a mainstream *nix desktop, although I do build for Raspberry Pi and Kobo.
Command line file utilities are not hard to have multi-build.
Dealing well with USB on multiple platforms is more complicated.
(And don't say, "libusb!")