How to completely hide preloaded ebooks from Kobo?

[Aleron Ives]

Hm, what books are they? I would expect Kobo to preload public domain books that are free, because otherwise Kobo is losing money by giving you books that you didn't buy.

In your previous post, you said there were both previews and public domain books in the list. You can download previews for free, so perhaps you should just make a list of all the books that interest you and then delete everything that Kobo preloaded. You can get your own copies of public domain books from sites like Standard E-Books and Global Grey, and then you can limit your downloads to the books you actually want, thus eliminating the clutter.

[PeterT]

It's weird; I don't recall any books being preloaded on my Libra Colour. Back in the day, the very original Kobo did come with 100 pre-loaded books; this however was back in the day when content was actually stored in the database.

[Skydog]

There were no pre-loaded books on my Libra Colour.

[DNSB]

The books will not have ADE encryption. If they have encryption, it will be Kobo's DRM which is easily enough removable. You could copy the kepub directory from inside the .kobo directory and rename the files inside the directory from guid lookalike to guid lookalike.epub and then try opening them to see which are encrypted.

As far as I recall, in an earlier thread, the books were in multiple languages and showed up when the ereader was set up in sideloaded mode.

[shyhermit]

DNSB, I think you just explained why I am seeing these books. I can't find this thread. Can you find it?

Here are two photos (update: deleted) showing just a small sample of these preloaded books:

As you see, there is even a Harry Potter book and a Spider-Man comic. I think DNSB is correct that somehow my sideload mode has triggered these books to appear. Why will this be the case?

Originally Posted by DNSB

As far as I recall, in an earlier thread, the books were in multiple languages and showed up when the ereader was set up in sideloaded mode.

[DNSB]

You might want to check the Deleting preloaded books from Kobo thread starting from around message #46. You could start at message #30 where the thread was revived after 11 years but #46 is the one I would suggest starting with.

[shyhermit]

Thanks, DNSB. I just read the thread.

In my case, there are 51 (not 52) such preview books.

Am I correct to understand that these are probably some "placeholder" books that were probably used to test the Kobo software during its early development and were simply left there over the years? During the normal course of the device setup (by signing onto a Kobo account), these books get cleared out so it is not an issue.

With sideloading, online activation gets bypassed so these "placeholder" books do not get cleared out as they ought to be. These books are not true previews but are actually phantom entries. As described in the other thread, tapping on a book under the Authors tab will prompt a message that there is actually no book attached to the book's author.

Am I correct that I am basically stuck as the only way to rid of these phantom entries is to delete them via editing the database as suggested by previous posters?

Originally Posted by DNSB

You might want to check the Deleting preloaded books from Kobo thread starting from around message #46. You could start at message #30 where the thread was revived after 11 years but #46 is the one I would suggest starting with.

[JSWolf]

delete post

[Cootey]

Originally Posted by Skydog

There were no pre-loaded books on my Libra Colour.

Same here. I wonder what the difference is? I also wondered why some of the early reviewers had the same books.

Curious to know if Kobo Libra Colour sold to Canadians have these books, but those sold to Americans do not.

[just_jeepin]

I just deleted them off my Libra Colour. They don't show but are still in my account.

[shyhermit]

Just want to give credit to JSWolf for your great suggestion.

I finally caved and installed Calibre, not to manage my ebooks but to solely rid of these problematic preloaded books. Indeed, as JSWolf rightly suggested, the special options in KoboTouchExtended are required in order to see these hidden books (otherwise they are invisible to Calibre). Once they are visible, they can be deleted.

Just another very strange side effect of bypassing the initial activation by enabling sideload mode.

Originally Posted by JSWolf

In the KoboTouchExtended driver, it's in the Metadata, on device & advanced tab. Under Show as on device you want to check Show archived books and Show previews.

That's my guess if settings need to be changed.

[recook]

Hi,

Originally Posted by JSWolf

In the KoboTouchExtended driver, it's in the Metadata, on device & advanced tab. Under Show as on device you want to check Show archived books and Show previews.

That's my guess if settings need to be changed.

With Calibre 7.13, Kobo utilities 2.16.3 and Kobo Touch extended 3.6.7, i enabled these options.
Now, the "virtual books" on my connected Kobo Nia do show up if connected with USB cable.
In Calibre, the appear in the device view as
"Title | Authors | Date | Size | Collections"
"FILE MISSING: title | author | some date before i bought the Nia | 0 B | Im_Reading,Preview"

Deleting them at 1st changed those rows from black to gray.
When i then did "Eject device", they disappeared, but the device stayed connected.
Did again eject, the device disconnected.
On reconnect, without problems, the virtual books stayed gone.
I hope that's it.