Classic Books in storage not appearing on my nook's "My Documents"

[MykelAlvis]

Kovid suggested I move my question to the nook forum so here goes:

Using Calibre exclusively to manage the books on my reader, it appears that when I transfer the books over to my nook they don't show up in the My Documents section of my library. Sometimes they do but I don't know what the incantation is that makes it happen.

Nothing I've transferred in the last 30 days seems to be available.

I've done "Check for New Content" about 30 times for the most recent transfer but they're still not in the list (and therefore not readable). The files are definitely on the nook and are definitely valid epubs (I've opened several from the desktop reader application off the nook mounted as a drive).

Once previously I managed to get a recalcitrant set of epubs available by completely hard resetting my nook (back to factory defaults) and re-transferring the list of books in its entirety. Clearly this solution is sub-optimal.

Any ideas about why this might be happening? Is it perhaps a known issue and I just haven't researched well enough?

Thanks for your input.

[RAH]

I don't think this is a "known issue." I do not have any trouble in this area, so unfortunately, I think it is unique to your setup.

One question - does Calibre think that the PC lib and the Nook lib are in synch? - i.e. when you look at the Nook with Calibre, if I remember correctly it puts a check beside books that are in both places, or some other indicator. From what you are describing, from Calibre's point of view, everything is correct, right? I'm just asking for background.

If the above is true, maybe you could try deleting the Nook books using Calibre and then getting Calibre to resend the books, although somehow I'll bet you've already tried that.

One thing you could do is transfer the ebook files manually (with Windows Explorer), from the Calibre library to the Nook. If you do this, you do not need to send the entire subdirectory but just the epub files themselves. I'll bet that makes the ebooks appear in the Nook's My Documents on the Nook display. This will allow you to at least read them on the Nook, although it doesn't solve your problem with using Calibre as your organizer.

[Doug Pardee]

The only problem that I've had was on the 1.2 NOOK firmware, where if I transferred to the added microSD card, I had to turn NOOK off (white screen) and back on to get it to rescan the added card. I haven't had any problem since 1.3 came out.

So I'm shooting in the dark here.

First, I assume that you're using either a NOOK 3G or NOOK Wi-Fi with 1.5 software. Right?

Are these going onto the main card, or onto the microSD? If onto the main card, are they going into the 'my documents' folder or somewhere else?

Have you tried a power-off and power-on? That should restart all of the reading software.

Have you tried a full re-boot (not factory fallback): hold power button for 20 seconds and turn back on, once? That should restart Android as well as the reading software.

How many e-books have you added? NOOK was, at least in the past, reportedly limited to how many entries you could have in each folder (somewhere between 1000 and 1500). Putting the e-books into folders within folders helps. I think think that's why the NOOK plugin for Calibre was changed to put the e-book and its cover JPEG into a folder--that cut the number of entries in the root folder in half.

Is it plausible that there's a "bad e-book" in there? NOOK displays everything by author and title, and if an e-book is missing either of those fields, NOOK can get cranky. You'd probably have noticed that in Calibre, though.

There's no reason that Calibre would do this, so it'd be something you'd be doing yourself: NOOK reportedly has trouble if you rename e-books on the device itself (as opposed to deleting the old file and copying in one with the new name). Still, a Check for New Content should clear that up and you've done that.

[MykelAlvis]

Calibre does think the two setups are in sync. The "OnDevice" setting for all of the maybe 1500 books is correct.

I've tried the power cycle a few times and it didn't change anything.

I'm using the latest Calibre, but many of the files were added quite a while so maybe it's a "number of files in the folder" problem. There are 695 folders at the root of My Documents, and there's a folder with News that has 238 items. The next 2 largest folders have 40 items and then it rapidly falls off to 2 items each. A search in Calibre of "OnDevice:Main" produces a list of 1113 items.
metadata.calibre in the root directory is 11MB (11498223 to be precise).

I suppose it's possible that there exists a bad epub, but having spot-checked about 100 of them with the desktop reader (directly off the nook as a drive) and I've not seen any issue. That being said, it's still entirely possible that there's something wrong. However, the problem seems to exist with blocks of books added (i.e. when I add 30 books to the device, none of them show up). If that's a problem with the Nook firmware and anyone else has seen that issue, I'd like to know so we can work up a decent support request to B&N.

After a bit, I decided that I'd try a scorched-earth policy once again. I tagged all files on the device in Calibre with a special tag. I quit Calibre and deleted all the files from my documents on the nook's filesystem. I deleted the Calibre metadata file in the root directory. I re-started Calibre, selected my special tag and generated a new catalog in epub format for sending to the device. After a bit of metadata correction on the files, it generated and copied the catalog.
After ejecting, it started the "Checking for new items" and sucessfully determined that I had 3 books on-board (Tour, User Guide, and the catalog I just generatd).

I then copied all the files with the special tag back onto the device (a total of 1061 +3 books).
After about 45 seconds, the nook started another "Checking for new items".
After about 15 minutes, everything was as it should be. All books appear to be present, although my reading now was obviously not working and I had no working bookmarks for any of my books.

So what have I learned here? Unfortunately, only that there was a mysterious metadata issue/I had a bad epub, OR that the changed number of files is now OK.

I'll continue to post to this thread when and if the problem repeats itself. The only real issue here is with time and my bookmarks. I'm willing to accept the time cost, but losing my bookmarks is a real problem for me.

[calisoccr1317]

I have been having the same problem, I got my Nook for Christmas and im not really tech savvy or anything. I have some pdf files that wouldnt show up on my Nook, so i downloaded the newest version of Calibre and converted about 30 files.

I have a Mac and when I attach my Nook, it shows up in Calibre. I send the converted file to my device and it shows up in the Device Library in Calibre. But when I eject the Nook and restart it, it doesnt show up in My documents.

I have even tried manually copying the files from my Mac to the Nook (in My Documents). But it never shows up, not even when I restart the device or check for new content.

I dont know if I am doing something wrong or what, but I do have some PDF and other epubs in My documents that were on my Mac that i successfully transferred to my Nook (not through Calibre).

Can anyone guide me through what I should do? Thanks!

[bgalbrecht]

I've got around 4000 ePub files in My Documents, all put there via Calibre. I have Calibre set up to send the files to my external microSDHC card, with the following path:

Calibre/{author_sort[0]}/{author_sort}/{title}-{id}/{title} - {authors}

There's a limit to the number of 512 files/folders in the root directory of a FAT16 filesystem (I'm not sure, but I think the internal memory is set up as FAT16), so I would recommend that you set it up so that you don't have the path start with a {author_sort} or other Calibre varaible.

[MykelAlvis]

Sorry for the VERY late reply, but @bgalbrecht appears to have determined the culprit.

[thrawn_aj]

Oh, thanks for reviving the thread (I would have missed it otherwise). It's a very useful thing to know since I'm coming up on that many folders - woulda happened to me sooner or later! Such an easy fix too .