KOReader calibre plugin

Hi,

I'm looking for someone who wants to help me maintain this plugin, because I don't use it all that much anymore. Please contact me if you're up for this.

Harm

A calibre plugin to synchronize metadata from KOReader to calibre.

KOReader creates sidecar files that hold read progress and annotations. This plugin reads the data from those sidecar files and updates calibre's metadata based on them. It is inspired by the Kobo Utilities plugin, that synchronizes reading progress between the original Kobo firmware (“Nickel”) and custom columns in calibre.

Note that at the moment the sync is one-way—from the KOReader device to calibre—and only works for USB and wireless devices. For the latter, you'll need KOReader 2021.04 or newer.

Releases will also be uploaded to this plugin thread on the MobileRead Forums. If you are on there as well, please let me know what you think of the plugin in that thread.

Using this plugin

Download and install

1. Go to your calibre's “Preferences” > “Plugins” > “Get new plugins” and search for “KOReader Sync”
2. Click “Install”
3. Restart calibre

Alternatively

1. Download the latest release from here.
2. Go to your calibre's “Preferences” > “Plugins” > “Load plugin from file” and point it to the downloaded ZIP file
3. Restart calibre

Setup

1. Pick and choose the metadata you would like to sync and create the appropriate columns in calibre. These are your options:
   • A “Floating point numbers” column to store the current percent read, with “Format for numbers” set to {:.0%}.
   • An “Integers” column to store the current percent read.
   • A regular “Text” column to store the location you last stopped reading at.
   • A “Rating” column to store your rating of the book, as entered on the book's status page.
   • A “Long text” column to store your review of the book, as entered on the book's status page.
   • A “Long text” column to store your bookmarks and highlights of the book, with “Interpret this column as” set to “Plain text formatted using markdown”. (Highlights are an unordered list with their metadata in an HTML comment.)
   • A regular “Text” column to store the reading status of the book, as entered on the book status page (“Finished”, “Reading”, “On hold”).
   • A “Date” column to store the date on which the book's status was last modified. (This is probably the date on which you marked it as read.)
   • A regular “Text” column to store the MD5 hash KOReader uses to sync progress to a KOReader Sync Server. (“Progress sync” in the KOReader app.) This might allow for syncing progress to calibre without having to connect your KOReader device, in the future.
   • A “Long text” column to store the raw contents of the metadata sidecar, with “Interpret this column as” set to “Plain text”.
2. Add “KOReader Sync” to “main toolbar when a device is connected”, if it isn't there already.
3. Right-click the “KOReader Sync” icon and “Configure”.
4. Map the metadata you want to sync to the newly created calibre columns.
5. Click “OK” to save your mapping.
6. From now on just click the “KOReader Sync” icon to sync all mapped metadata for all books on the connected device to calibre.

Things to consider

• The plugin overwrites existing metadata without asking. That usually isn’t a problem, because you will probably only add to KOReader’s metadata. But be aware that you might lose data in calibre if you’re not careful.

Supported devices

This plugin has been tested successfully with:

• Kobo Aura connected over USB, which means it will probably work for all comparable Kobo devices (KOBO and KOBOTOUCH)
• Kobo Aura H2O over USB (KOBOTOUCHEXTENDED, see #6 for details)
• Kobo Aura connected wirelessly, which means it will probably work for all calibre connect devices (SMART_DEVICE_APP)
• A connected folder (FOLDER_DEVICE)
• Kindle Keyboard (KINDLE2, see #1 for details)
• Tolino Vision 4 HD (TOLINO, see this comment for details)
• PocketBook Touch Lux 5 (which uses the POCKETBOOK626 driver, so it will probably work for all comparable PocketBook devices, see #8 for details)
• PocketBooks that use the POCKETBOOK622 driver

This plugin is not compatible with:

• MTP_DEVICE (see #2 for details)

Issues

If you encounter any issues with the plugin, please submit them here.

Acknowledgements

• Multiple tweaks and bug fixes by Glen Sawyer
• Contains SirAnthony's SLPP to parse Lua in Python.
• Some code borrowed from--and heavily inspired by--the great Kobo Utilities calibre plugin.

Contributing to this plugin

Notes & Tips

• My first attempt was actually to sync calibre with KOReader's read progress through the progress sync plugin and a sync server. Read here why that did not work. This plugin might actually make that possible now by allowing you to store KOReader's MD5 hash in calibre...
• calibre allows you to auto-connect to a folder device on boot, which greatly speeds up your workflow when testing. You can find this under “Preferences” > “Tweaks”, search for auto_connect_to_folder. Point that to the dummy_device folder in this repository. (I have included royalty free EPUBs for your and my convenience.)
• If you're testing and don't actually want to update any metadata, set DRY_RUN to True in __init__.py.
• I work in PyCharm, which offers a remote debugging server. Follow these steps to set that up. To enable that in this plugin, set PYDEVD to True in __init__.py.You might need to change sys.path.append in action.py.
• The supported device drivers can be found in the supported_devices list at line 366 in action.py. Adding a new type here is the first step to adding support, but make sure all features are tested thoroughly before releasing a version with an added device

Downloading dependencies

make dependencies

Testing in calibre

Make sure you have the dependencies. Then:

make dev

Alternatively, build a release and load that:

make zip load

Building a release

Make sure you have the dependencies and have set the correct version number in __init__.py, pluginIndexKOReaderSync.txt and Makefile. Then:

make zip

Debugging a release

1. Download the required release from here
2. Add it to calibre by running this in your terminal: calibre-customize -a "KOReader Sync vX.X.X-alpha.zip", where X.X.X refers to the version you downloaded
3. Start calibre in debug mode with calibre-debug -g
4. Configure the KOReader plugin as described here
5. Connect your device
6. Run the sync by clicking the KOReader icon in your toolbar
7. Check the details of the message when it's done if any/all books have been synced correctly
8. Check your (custom) columns for one of those books to see if their contents are what they should be
9. Check the output in your terminal for lines containing koreader to see what it did

Sending in your patches

Contributing patches on sourcehut works through git send-email. You can find this repository's mailing list here.

Changelog

All notable changes to this project will be documented here.

The format is based on Keep a Changelog, and this project adheres to Semantic Versioning.

Unreleased

[0.2.7-alpha] - 2022-02-18

Added

• Enable TOLINO, for real this time

[0.2.6-alpha] - 2022-02-04

Added

• Enable POCKETBOOK622

0.2.5-alpha - 2021-12-20

Added

• Enable POCKETBOOK626

0.2.4-alpha - 2021-12-12

Added

• Enable TOLINO

0.2.3-alpha - 2021-11-23

Added

• Enable KOBOTOUCHEXTENDED

0.2.2-alpha - 2021-06-22

Fixed

• Skip metadata sidecars that cannot be decoded (e.g. from a very old version of KOReader)

Changed

• Use path instead of lpath for book paths to go around MTP_DEVICE lowercasing the latter
• Disable MTP_DEVICE because it cannot be supported (see #2)

Added

• Enable KINDLE2

0.2.1-alpha - 2021-04-26

Added

• An extra column for read progress as integer (because that’s what the Goodreads Sync plugin expects)

0.2.0-alpha - 2021-04-24

Added

• Support for highlights and bookmarks
• Counts to post-sync alerts
• An .editorconfig and .pylintrc to define code layout

Changed

• README.md to reflect current state of development

0.1.4-alpha - 2021-04-11

Fixed

• Multiple tweaks and bug fixes by Glen Sawyer

0.1.3-alpha - 2021-04-04

Added

• Support for SMART_DEVICE_APP devices, i.e. KOReader's wireless connnection

0.1.2-alpha - 2020-11-21

Added

• Support for KOBO and KOBOTOUCH devices

0.1.1-alpha - 2020-11-18

Added

• Support for all possible filetypes
• Variables to easily enable a dry-run when debugging and remote debugging

0.1.0-alpha - 2020-11-18

Added

• Everything needed for a first working version of the plugin
• dummy_device and dummy_library for easy debugging
• Makefile to build a plugin release as a ZIP file
• TODO to keep to-dos in one place
• environment.yml, in case anyone wants to recreate my Conda environment
• This README.md