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marcus-crane / october

A simple GUI for retrieving Kobo highlights and syncing them with Readwise
https://october.utf9k.net
MIT License
171 stars 10 forks source link

Kobo Desktop #59

Closed kahyalar closed 2 years ago

kahyalar commented 2 years ago

Hello,

Tool looks promising but I was wondering, is there any support on Kobo's Desktop Reader app for Mac?

Looking forward!

marcus-crane commented 2 years ago

Ah interesting, October doesn't have any support for the Desktop Reader app (as I don't use it myself) but I can have a look at how complex it would be to support.

I didn't realise you can actually read eBooks within it which is interesting, although I imagine they're only store bought books.

Do you know how highlight syncing works like if you make highlights with the Desktop Reader, do they sync back to your eReader and vice versa?

marcus-crane commented 2 years ago

I'm actually quite surprised but Kobo Desktop works out of the box with no changes required to October because it uses the exact same database layout at the Kobo itself.

CleanShot 2022-06-27 at 22 55 04@2x

You just need to copy ~/Library/Application Support/Kobo/Kobo Desktop Edition/Kobo.sqlite somewhere that October can see (ie; your desktop) and then load it in using the "Load in a local Kobo database (advanced)" button

cp ~/Library/Application\ Support/Kobo/Kobo\ Desktop\ Edition/Kobo.sqlite ~/Desktop should do the trick

Now there are a couple of caveats however.

I only have a couple of Kobo store books and I wasn't able to get highlights to sync between the copy I had on my eReader and the desktop app.

Syncing the desktop app database successfully merged those highlights alongside the highlights I had already synced with my eReader but you could end up doing double highlights and that if you highlight the same passage twice between the two. If you just use the desktop app then that isn't a problem.

I haven't tested out syncing with the mobile app yet either so I'm not sure how that'll behave.

On a side note, the desktop app would crash whenever I add annotations but they still get saved. It's just annoying though.

kahyalar commented 2 years ago

Hey, it worked flawlessly. I wasn't expecting it to that smooth as you said 😃

Thanks a lot for responding this fast!

Best, F

marcus-crane commented 2 years ago

No problem! I need to get back to the rewrite so seeing interest in the project is a good motivator 🙂