help getting Kobo Mini (Touch?) to work with Calibre tags?

[yhlee]

Hi! I think I am stupid at technology. :-( I've been trying to follow this guide and I'm stuck at the very beginning. I did the custom column in Calibre, but then it says

Configured either the Kobo Touch or the Kobo Touch Extended driver depending on which you are using.
Preferences | Advanced | Plugins
Expand Device Interface plugins section and look for KoboTouch or Kobo Touch Extended driver
With KoboTouch or Kobo Touch Extended highlighted, select Customize plugin

I can't find anything called Preferences that goes into Advanced, let alone Plugins. When I'm in an ebook I see a wrench at the bottom that goes into two pages of reading preferences, and at the top I can go into a button with a gear called Settings. The Settings available are Account, Sleep and power, Date and time, Language, Reading settings (seems to be same as the wrench), Reading Life, Wi Fi connection, Device information, About Kobo Mini, and Extras. Investigating these options hasn't turned up any sort of Plugins I can tinker with. Help?

I mean, I shouldn't complain--this device was a hand-me-down so it cost me nothing, but I've pretty much stopped reading fanfic because I can't organize it in a way that I find helpful without doing it by hand, and I figured I'd make one more try to get it to work for me.

Comments

[tanaqui]

Hi there - it looks like you're trying to do this on your Kobo, but (and the instructions aren't at all clear about this!), the step you're stuck on is something you need to do in Calibre i.e. go to the Preferences area (with the gears icon) in Calibre and choose Plugins from under the Advanced section. Then you can expand "Device Interface Plugins", find and highlight the Kobo Touch driver and choose "Customise plug-in" at the bottom of the screen.

Let me know if that doesn't work. (I have this working on my Kobo Touch, but it's a while since I set it up, so I may be able to help you figure it out if you get stuck again.)

[yhlee]

OMG you are GENIUS. I did it like you said and it worked--thank you so much. Fanfic, here I come! :-D

[tanaqui]

Hooray - glad to hear you've got it working! I think it took me three attempts before I fully figured out those instructions and got it set up and synching correctly, so I definitely recognized your pain. :-)

Enjoy the fanfic!

[elf]

Also--you are not stupid at this. There is NOTHING intuitive about working with ebooks, and the more the device manufacturers try to "simplify" things, the more they push towards "just point your device at our store, click 'pay now' and poof, you have ebook."

They don't want sideloading to work well. They don't make money off sideloading. Ebook readers not affiliated with a store cost 3-7x what the ones connected with a store cost, because they expect store purchases to subsidize the ereader--so they make non-store functions secondary and often clunky.

Calibre is a powerful tool attempting to interface with a dozen different devices, and keep its software compatible with all of theirs, which are designed to be as different as possible so that it's hard to switch brands. You're working with tech that's designed to be opaque to the consumer and a program that's designed to do several disparate functions.

And all the instructions to do anything the device sellers didn't intend, are written by fans who may or may not provide enough background information. There's nobody vetting those instructions for end-user comprehensibility. You're not missing the obvious; you're missing background info that wasn't clearly provided.

[yhlee]

Oh God it's not just me? :-]

It's so weird, though--I would carry an ereader around more and feel warmer fuzzier feelings about it if it made things like sideloading super-easy, because I get a lot of my reading from National Academies Press (I read the PDFs on my Kindle DX), RPGs (they are often sold in PDF format), and fanfic; and the more I carried the ereader around, the more I'd tend to want to buy from its native store. But no!

(This observation based on what happened when I got a smartphone and discovered certain things that I loved doing making me more likely to carry it around making me more likely to buy more things it me more likely to carry it around etc.)

[elf]

Key point to keep in mind: Publishers, for many years, sold to distributors, who sold to bookstores, who sold to readers. Publishers have zero interest in what readers want--and zero awareness of how readers act as customers.

Followup point: every ebookstore has a vested interest in DRM, because that means you can't easily switch platforms.

All either of them knows about sideloading is "that's books that we don't make money on."

Also, while bookstores were very aware that used/shared books pushed their own income--if nobody's borrowing books from friends, nobody's buying new ones, either--neither distributors nor publishers were ever involved in those social dynamics. The online bookstores are a lot more like distributors than local bookshops; they don't talk with customers, and their catalogs are take-it-or-leave-it arrangements on a national level.

They've made a device that does what they want it to do, and they're under the impression that if they fancy up their own bookstore, you will buy from them, especially if they make it hard to use the device for anything else. They really are oblivious to the concept that making reading easy & fun will result in more sales.

[liv]

I really appreciate this comment, because I kind of knew all this stuff but I never really put it together. That explains why lots of e-readers have dropped support for .txt and .rtf as they move to later models. That explains why side-loading, even of non-DRM'd books and fics, is such a pain. And why none of the ereaders on the market really have a sensible way of organizing books and collections, either on the device itself or on a desktop. And why (even discounting DRM issues) it's really hard to move my collection to a new device when the old one reaches the end of its life or breaks.

[elf]

I'm looking at getting a Sony 650, which is the last version that supported txt and rtf, and were made recently enough that the batteries aren't all dying yet. But it's getting harder to find ereaders in the US that support anything other than epub and pdf.

All of the ereaders treat their book collections like a bookshelf, or a couple of shelves; none of them are any good at managing the amount of books it's now easy to include in them. Even without the huge memory cards... 2gb of ebooks is easily 1000 ebooks, and can be 5000 if there's no cover art involved and some of them are short stories. If a lot of them are short stories... if you ever want to totally fluster a person in a physical store who's trying to sell ereaders, ask them how well it copes with 8000 ebooks.