Comment by frameset

3 years ago

I pretty much have to use it for some things, but as sibling commenters have pointed out, there are some serious flaws with both it and its maintainer. I've mostly moved to using [Calibre Web](https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web) which is a software intended as a companion, but I use it almost exclusively.

It has a web interface, and you can deploy it using a container. The killer feature for me that Calibre itself lacks is that has over the internet syncing with the native Kobo firmware. You essentially trick the Kobo into thinking it's calling home to get ebooks from their servers, but you're accessing your own instance of Calibre-web.

This makes my workflow of adding a new ebook as simple as uploading it to my hosted instance of calibre-web, and then next time I pick up my kobo it will automatically download it.

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frameset

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dmos62  3 years ago

> I pretty much have to use it for some things, but as sibling commenters have pointed out, there are some serious flaws with both it and its maintainer

Your sibling comments have not mentioned or alluded to any such flaws. Do you have criticism to share?

  • frameset  3 years ago

    Other commenters have pointed out that the lack of a self replacing auto-updater in a modern desktop app is striking to put it mildly. It has a pretty bad UI, that seems to be getting worse especially with regard to the shades of grey. If you bring up these flaws the maintainer can react quite poorly, even when the subject is broached politely and in good faith.

    And to add my complaints to those of other commenters, hosting the library on another computer or network share is not supported, and you can't use an external DB provider e.g. MySQL.

nicoco  3 years ago

>as simple as uploading it to my hosted instance of calibre-web, and then next time I pick up my kobo it will automatically download it.

Wow, sounds really nice, you got my attention! My stack to achieve the same result is a bit more complicated: I installed KOreader on my device, and it can read calibre's OPDS catalog feed. KOreader has some other niceties that I enjoy, mostly wallabag support.

How do you trick the native kodo firmware? Does it work outside your home network?

  • frameset  3 years ago

    Yes it does, I use a reverse proxy with ssl and have CW on its own subdomain.

    There's a plain text config file on the Kobo's memory and one of the config options is the store URL. CW generates you a new one tied to your local CW account in your instance and you replace the standard URL. You can do multi user stuff that way. You can also define a "shelf" and only books on that shelf will sync if you wish, handy if you have a large collection or a small memory Kobo.

    The guide on setting up the Kobo sync feature is here: https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web/wiki/Kobo-Integratio...

  • input_sh  3 years ago

    > How do you trick the native kodo firmware?

    You just change the API endpoint in some file in .kobo on the device.

    > Does it work outside your home network?

    If you expose calibre-web publicly, sure. In my experience it takes a bit of effort to do that right, but it's doable.

    Its wiki is fairly good and usually answers all the questions I have: https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web/wiki/Kobo-Integratio...

AdmiralAsshat  3 years ago

Looks cool, but the wiki calls out that it can't sync reading progress between devices. Which, I understand--how Kobo does it is probably not well-documented. But without that, the solution doesn't seem any better than the Dropbox support with certain Kobo models. It would only be of interest to me if I could sync e.g. my Sage before putting it down and pick up my Clara somewhere else and be able to find my place in the books I'm currently reading.

Not even the Dropbox integration does this yet with sideloaded books, though. I think KOReader might be the only one that has pulled it off so far.

Bayart  3 years ago

Thanks for the heads up on this project. I use Calibre but I find it highly idiosyncratic. This fits my needs better.