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.

[anychen]

Originally Posted by 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.

Hi do you have a link I can follow to set this up? I have more or less 1000 ebooks and need to sideload them to my Kobo Libra Colour. Thanks!

[DNSB]

You can check the Kobo Utilities for the plugin information. You can add the plugin from calibre (Preferences => Plugins =>Get new plugins). The plugin has builtin help (click on the plugin icon and then on help) and if you need more, you can ask in that thread.

For the most part, if this is the first time you are using a Kobo reader, changing the date to the calibre's date will keep the date order in which you added the books to calibre.

For the KoboTouch driver, I use the following save template:

Elib/{author_sort:sublist(0,1,&)}/{title} - {authors:sublist(0,1,&)}

The Elib is the directory in the root of the exposed USB storage with the books sorted into directories based on the first entry in the author_sort and the filename based on the title and the first author in the author list (what the :sublist(0,1,&) does).

I've attached some images of how I have configured the KoboTouch driver. Any items you are wondering about, just ask.

[foosion]

I have a similar question. I have a Libra 2 and am thinking of also getting a Clara BW (pocketable for when that's useful). If so, I'd like a way of keeping the two devices in sync (same books and positions in those books on both). That way I could pick up either device and continue reading.

I've loaded books from Calibre to the Libra 2 using the Extended plugin to convert everything to KePub (I don't intend to load from any other source).

I keep a record of the books on the Libra 2 with the Reading List plugin (it updates the list whenever I plug in). I could just highlight the books on the list, plug in the Clara BW and send to that device. That way I'd have the same books on both devices. As I get new books I could load to both. Would that make sense?

Would I use Kobo Utilities to keep both at the same read positions? Would Kobo Utilities let me record positions from one device, then send them to the other? I'm much less clear on this. Is there a better way?

Any suggestions or clarifications would be appreciated.

[Sirtel]

There are few ways to sync the reading progress of sideloaded books across Kobo devices. One is to use the Kobo Utilities plugin. Yes, you can get the progress from one device and send it to the other, but IMO it's faster and easier to just remember a word or a phrase on the page where you left off, unless you read several books at once.

I use my Sage and Libra 2 this way - the same books are on both (I don't use the Reading List plugin, just a tag to mark which books are on my Kobos). As I don't connect my readers to my PC very often, I just try to remember where I left off, mostly successfully.

Another way to sync reading progress (via wifi) is supposed to be Koblime:
https://kobli.me/
I haven't used it myself, although I plan to try it someday, so I have no idea how well it works.

[foosion]

Originally Posted by Sirtel

There are few ways to sync the reading progress of sideloaded books across Kobo devices. One is to use the Kobo Utilities plugin. Yes, you can get the progress from one device and send it to the other, but IMO it's faster and easier to just remember a word or a phrase on the page where you left off, unless you read several books at once.

I use my Sage and Libra 2 this way - the same books are on both (I don't use the Reading List plugin, just a tag to mark which books are on my Kobos). As I don't connect my readers to my PC very often, I just try to remember where I left off, mostly successfully.

Another way to sync reading progress (via wifi) is supposed to be Koblime:
https://kobli.me/
I haven't used it myself, although I plan to try it someday, so I have no idea how well it works.

Yes, if I'm just reading one book it's easier to just note a phrase or finish a chapter. I do sometime read several books at once, so was looking for a more automated solution.

It's easy for me to connect to my computer so a method involving a cable is easy.

Koblime appears to be designed for this type of thing, but I'd rather not give a third party access to my devices. I see they intend to release a manual sync method, so that may overcome my privacy concerns. The entire project looks interesting but seems a work in progress.

[PeterT]

While koblime looks interesting, I sense it is abandonware

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by PeterT

While koblime looks interesting, I sense it is abandonware

Very possibly, as any activity seems to have taken place 2 years ago and bug reports go unanswered.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Sirtel

There are few ways to sync the reading progress of sideloaded books across Kobo devices. One is to use the Kobo Utilities plugin. Yes, you can get the progress from one device and send it to the other, but IMO it's faster and easier to just remember a word or a phrase on the page where you left off, unless you read several books at once.

Even easier is to finish the current chapter and then on the other Kobo go to the new chapter.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Sirtel

Another way to sync reading progress (via wifi) is supposed to be Koblime:
https://kobli.me/
I haven't used it myself, although I plan to try it someday, so I have no idea how well it works.

It doesn't work all that well if it still works. You do not get the extended metadata such as series. It's basically like taking a book you've saved to disk and using Windows Explorer to load it on your Kobo.