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Enabling reading stats on kobo devices with side loaded epubs

I'm a big fan of ereaders and I've own several of them, I currently own a Kobo Aura HD and I'm really happy with it, but there was something missing, something from the Kindle world that I really liked the "time remaining" feature

Kobo firmware 2.3 introduced some nice utilities, similar to what amazon brought with their Kindle Paperwhite, to enhance the reading experience, among them chapter pagination and "remaining time" for book and chapter

The issue with these features is that by default they are only available for EPUBs that you bought directly from Kobo since these are actually no longer EPUBs but KEPUBs (Kobo epubs) so that they can add these new gimmicks

But as usual Calibre comes to the rescue since someone has developed a plugin (which is actually an extended Kobo driver for calibre) that enables the Kobo specific stuff to side-loaded epubs

You can find it here and the mobileread thread where you can get more infos regarding this plugin

The plugin developer states that it should work with the Kobo Aura but that is "officially untested". Well I did test it with my Kobo Aura HD, and I can say (at least for the moment) that I had 0 issues with it and all works as expected ! (once I upgraded my Calibre version that was actually pretty stale)

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8 comments:

  1. AnonymousJanuary 13, 2014 at 8:50 AM

    I am having problem with highlighting which does not work anymore, don't you ?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Ulises FasoliJanuary 13, 2014 at 8:53 AM

      Hi,
      I normally do not use the highlighting feature but I just tried it and it does work.
      Do you have the latest version of Calibre, the kepub plugin and kobo firmware?

      Delete
    2. AnonymousJanuary 13, 2014 at 9:06 AM

      Yes I have last version for calibre, plugin and FW.
      I just test it now. And it seems to work for the first pages. But when I go somewhere else in the book it does not work. It is a bit strange I will try to make some test.
      I have not the aura but the kobo mini.

      Delete
  2. Ulises FasoliJanuary 13, 2014 at 9:13 AM

    I've just tested it in different chapters of a few books and it works no matter what page I'm in..
    I do not have the kobo mini to test it though so maybe is an issue with this particular model?

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  3. AnonymousJanuary 13, 2014 at 9:37 AM

    I have found the problem. There was some errors in my epub. Before the first error, highlighting works, after It does not work. I have both css and epub errors, I do not know which one cause the misfunctioning. Hope that will help someone.
    Thank you for your quick response.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Ulises FasoliJanuary 13, 2014 at 9:38 AM

    Yes I can imagine how CSS and epub errors could mess-up highliting.. so it might be related to the file and not the device.
    Good luck with it ;)

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  5. UnknownMarch 16, 2014 at 11:20 AM

    Hi,
    I can't see the in book reading statistics. What did I do wrong?

    ReplyDelete
  6. Ulises FasoliMarch 16, 2014 at 11:31 AM

    Hi,
    Yes I have the same problem. Apparently this is a Kobo restriction for side downloaded KePubs (since firmware 2.9+)
    see here : https://github.com/jgoguen/calibre-kobo-driver/#known-issues.
    Hopefully the plugin developer will fix this in the future..

    ReplyDelete