Touch Shelf management on Touch

[timss]

I have a Touch with a lot of books on an SD card. Most are non-fiction, and organized in categories by folder name. Converting these folders into shelves one book at a time is an extremely tedious process. Is calibre the only way to create the shelves I want, or is there another way to do it by accessing the sqlite file directly?

Maybe Kobo will eventually provide shelf management in Kobo desktop, or is that too much to hope for?

Thanks

[PeterT]

See this for one approach

Originally Posted by deufeufeu

Hi,
I just got a new Kobo Touch yesterday but the shelves feature seemed broken by the fact that I couldn't do a "check all" while searching to add books.
So I wrote a python script that will build shelves based on the directory in which your ebooks are located. For example if you have all IronThrones books in the folder /mnt/onboard/IronThrones it will make a shelf named IronThrones with all books of this folder added.
The script is here http://pastebin.com/hX2kqQ9b .
I don't have time to explain how to make it works, but I'm sure those having rooted their kobos will have no problem.

[davidfor]

You can also add multiple books to the shelf through the device. From the shelf, press the menu icon in the bottom right and select "Manage". On the next screen, press the "Add Books" at the top. The list of all books is displayed. Press the "+" to add each to a shelf. You can also press the magnifying glass to do a search and select books to add from the result.

The above is using the latest firmware. The exact options have changed over time, so maybe older firmware is different.

[timss]

I've been doing the multiple selection method, but it's still tedious, and I still have a few hundred books to go...

I'm not a programmer, so I wouldn't know how to use PeterT's script.

I was hoping there might be a way to use an sqlite utility to select books by folder and add them to an existing shelf.

[davidfor]

Sorry, I haven't seen anything else. There have been a couple of scripts similar to the one Peter pointed to. If you are confident in you SQL skills, you can use any SQLite browser to create the appropriate rows in the tables. Once there are a few, it is obvious what is needed.

Note: for anyone who thinks of trying it, the script Peter pointed to is for older firmware. When it creates the shelf, it puts a NULL into a column that no longer allows NULLs. If you want to use this, you need to change the line:

c.execute("INSERT INTO Shelf VALUES ('2012-07-25T19:59:29Z', NULL, '%s', '2012-07-25T19:59:29Z', '%s', NULL, 'false', 'true', 'false')" % (shelf,shelf))

To:

c.execute("INSERT INTO Shelf VALUES ('2012-07-25T19:59:29Z', '%s', '%s', '2012-07-25T19:59:29Z', '%s', NULL, 'false', 'true', 'false')" % (shelf,shelf,shelf))

And the timestamps should be set to the current time.

[PeterT]

What you could do is to add the shelves and a few sample books on the Kobo. Then open the database via a tool like Dbeaver and take a look at the ShelfContent table. It shoul

[timss]

Originally Posted by PeterT

What you could do is to add the shelves and a few sample books on the Kobo. Then open the database via a tool like Dbeaver and take a look at the ShelfContent table. It shoul

I'll take a look it. I can display the contents of shelves with sqlite administrator, but my current knowledge of SQL commands is about nil.

BTW I think your post got cut off or something...

[PeterT]

Originally Posted by timss

I'll take a look it. I can display the contents of shelves with sqlite administrator, but my current knowledge of SQL commands is about nil.

BTW I think your post got cut off or something...

Lol... It did... I was typing on my tablet and meant to come back to it.

What I was going to say was this.

For simplicity, create the shelves on the Kobo itself.

Then using any tool capable of editing SQLite tables you want to insert rows into the ShelfContent table. The key bits of info are:
ShelfName: The internal name from the Shelf table
ContentId: The location of the book going onto the shelf.
This can be found from the content table.