Calibre on Janusworx

The Kobo Elipsa 2e, Six Months Later

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Fri, 16 Feb 2024 09:28:55 +0530

My beloved, battered, Elipsa 2e. Click the image for a larger image.

It’s been close to ~~six~~ seven months, since I moved over from the Oasis to the Elipsa.

Here’s my list of things / experiences with the Elipsa 2e, positive and negative, in no order whatsever. Also this is not representative of a typical ebook reader¹. I, umm … have a lot of books, and the Elipsa carries most of them. So every action that it does, it does with that number of books (either physically or with its database) …

I love it!
It’s very light for its size. I don’t feel the weight of this 10″ device as much as I felt the old 7″ Oasis.
It’s very fast.
I use it just like a book. It lends itself to such use as well. Part of it is the weight, part of it, is its responsiveness.
This is also how I broke it. I threw it on the bed and then it slipped right over the edge, and cracked the screen 😂 You can see the big chonky part that is permanantly dead, as well as the thin, dead, vertical and horizontal lines. Since I read with fat margins, the chonky part does not get in my way² and the lines are mostly invisible.
~~I cannot enlarge images in a book. I tap, I double tap, I pinch to zoom … nothing. This is the one thing I miss from the Oasis.~~ A few hours later: Of course, now it works! 😂 Double tapping an image, opens up the image where I can zoom and pan around! My fault for not noticing this earlier.
I love it!
It hangs loading complicated books or large pdfs, but it recovers quickly. This does not happen that often.
It randomly hangs and/or crashes. This happens quite often. But I’ve learnt to reboot it with the power button, and it comes right back up, quickly. It reminds me of the Am386 machines, I’d assemble for use as Netware thin clients in my youth. They would run hot and crash ofen, but we didn’t mind, because they rebooted right back so darned fast 😂
Not that the Elipsa runs hot. It just runs fast and crashes. And then comes back on and carries on as if nothing ever happened.
Did I tell you, I love it?
On paper, the screen specs look inferior to the Oasis. In practice, it made no difference to these old eyes.
The user experience is not as good is it could be, but it’s miles better than anything else I’ve used. I figured out most of it intuitively. I love just running my finger along the left edge to adjust the brightness. Helps a lot when I’m reading in bed, so that the better half does not get disturbed (or grumble at me much.)
Books on the Kobo store are a bit more expensive than the Amazon store. (New releases tend to cost the same.)
The database that it uses, gets corrupted quite often, which then leads to it no longer being able to talk to my PC or not showing the books in the device³. I doubt, I’d love the Elipsa as much as I do, if the Calibre ecosystem didn’t support it so well.⁴
- I can backup and restore the database at will, thanks to the awesome Kobo Utilities plugin.
- I’m getting old and impatient and want to read a lot more. So I’ve given up on taking notes by hand and moved over to highlighting and making notes in the Elipsa. I wouldn’t do this if not for the lovely Annotations plugin, which lets me get all my notes and highlights out of the Elipsa and into Calibre. (pic below, click to embiggen) The jury’s still out on this one.
I love it so much, that when I heard a friend was going to the USA, I bullied them into buying me another one to replace this one when it dies.

To conclude, the Elipsa 2e is wonderful.
It has flaws that I can live with.
It serves me well.
I love it!

Feedback on this post? Mail me at feedback at this domain

P.S. Subscribe to my mailing list!
Forward these posts and letters to your friends and get them to subscribe!
P.P.S. Feed my insatiable reading habit.

the person, not the device ↩︎
much ↩︎
This point I think, is more a me problem, than a device problem ↩︎
Note to the Kobo folk, please care about your device software a smidgen. Please! At least at as much, if not more than these lovely open source folk do! ↩︎

Using Regex to Prepend to Titles in Calibre

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sat, 20 Nov 2021 12:04:27 +0530

So I do this peculiar thing, where I prepend the author’s initials to the title of every book I add to Calibre.¹ ²

And all these years, I’ve just been manually editing the metadata, everytime I added a book, and changing the titles to what I want.
It’s not a problem if it’s just one book, but I normally tend to go hogwild with authors, normally buying out / downloading all their work.
And now that I’ve learnt the basics of the hammer called regex, I wanted to see, you guessed it, if there was a way to quickly do this using regular expressions in Caliber, which has inbuilt support for regexes.

A quick look through the documentation led me to the search and replace page, which explains really pretty well … well, how search and replace works :)

So what did I need to do?
I needed to take the initial character of the title of any book.
And then replace it with author initials + that character

So here’s the Calibre search and replace box when I choose to edit the metadata for multiple books.
I choose Regular expression as my MO and I choose the title field to work with.
You can see the titles of the books, I chose below³

Then, in the “Search for:” box, I go looking for a single character at the beginning of the title.
With regex I express that as a ^.
I’ve surrounded that pattern with () brackets to tell regex to remember what it matched.
You’ll see that I’ve matched the character succcesfully and the “A” from A Journey … and the “T” from Twenty Thousand … are missing in the Test results in the bottom right.

Now in the “Replace with:” box, I tell the regex engine what to match it with.
Which in my case are the author initials “JV” followed by a “ - ” seperator followed by a \1 which tells it to put the match that I found earlier back in.
You can see, now that the titles match the crazy way, I want them.

We do an ok, and Tada!
The books are renamed in the library :)

All hail the power of regex!

P.S. Subscribe to my mailing list!
Forward these posts and letters to your friends and get them to subscribe!
P.P.S. Feed my insatiable reading habit.

Why? ↩︎
Calibre is a rock solid, does not get in your way, marvellously multifunctional way of categorising ebooks and comics. And that is just scratching the tip of everything Calibre can do ↩︎
Click the images for a larger version ↩︎

Reset Confirmations in Calibre

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Mon, 02 Aug 2021 11:35:33 +0530

I have been deleting too many books by mistake, now a days.
Past Jason might have been pretty sure about what he wanted, but I sure as heck am not.

So I had to do a bit of spelunking to figure out how to get the delete book option to confirm first.

All I needed to do was Preferences -> Behaviour -> Reset all disabled confirmation dialogs

Et voilà, Calibre now asks me if I am sure about deleting my books :)