Kobo Glo — does it really work with micro SD?

Dilisk

The Kobo Glo user manual says:

"If your books are not protected by DRM, you can add
them to your eReader using a Micro SD card."

Does anyone have personal experience of this? Please
report your experience, whether successful or not.

If possible, please report the version of SD that you used.
(According to Wikipedia, there are a number of versions,
including SDSC, SDHC, and SDXC.)

To give some context to my question: I want to obtain books
in EPUB format from Project Gutenberg and read them on my
Kobo Glo using a micro SD card. (I know this can be done
using Kobo Desktop, but I can't run that because it's not
available for Linux.)

coylemj

The Kobo Glo website says that it supports microSD up to 32GB which means that it will support SD and SDHC but not SDXC cards. All of the mobile phone shops sell microSD cards. Just stay at 32GB or less and you'll be fine, don't worry about the acronyms.

Dilisk

Thanks for your reply. But the main purpose of my question
was to inquire whether the Glo supports SD *at all*.

I know the documentation claims it does, but I'm a little
doubtful about that, because I don't have a high opinion
of Kobo's quality assurance.

My main concern is not that the Glo will be unable to
communicate with the card, but rather, that it will fail to
update its database of books, that books on the SD card
will therefore not be displayed in the list of books,
and hence will be unavailable.

circadian

I forgot to grab my Kobo this morning but I can test it on Linux for you tomorrow. I can't see why it wouldn't just mount the microSD as storage like it would in Windows. I always use the drag and drop feature.

coylemj

Dilisk wrote: »

Thanks for your reply. But the main purpose of my question
was to inquire whether the Glo supports SD *at all*.

I know the documentation claims it does, but I'm a little
doubtful about that, because I don't have a high opinion
of Kobo's quality assurance.

Can't help you there I'm afraid. If you put in a microSD card that's 32GB or less and the device can't read from it then I suggest you ask for your money back from wherever you bought it.

Dilisk

Answering my own question: yes, the Glo can indeed use
books on a micro SD card. I have verified this with a
SanDisk SDHC card.

The only irritant (so far) is that when the Glo is
displaying a list of books on the Library screen, there
is a noticeable delay before a book's icon is displayed.
The reason for this, presumably, is that data transfer
from the SD card is slower than it would be from the Glo's
built-in storage.

Gamayun

Dilisk wrote: »

Answering my own question: yes, the Glo can indeed use
books on a micro SD card. I have verified this with a
SanDisk SDHC card.

The only irritant (so far) is that when the Glo is
displaying a list of books on the Library screen, there
is a noticeable delay before a book's icon is displayed.
The reason for this, presumably, is that data transfer
from the SD card is slower than it would be from the Glo's
built-in storage.

Hi Dilisk,

I have a Kobo Mini myself and whilst drag and drop is handy I think Calibre is well worth checking out too.

It will recognise your Kobo and you can drop books onto your internal memory or sd card.

It's very handy for changing the Metadata (title, author etc), managing your library, getting new covers etc. you can even use the Edit Ebook function to remove the Project Gutenburg conditions from the start/end of the ebook (though some basic HTML/CSS knowledge will help greatly here).

It also allows you to convert ebook formats. There's a plug-in called EpubMerge which allows you to merge epubs together and auto-creates a table of contents, very handy for making short story or author anthologies.

Anyway, the version in the Software Manager for Ubuntu/Mint et al is hopelessly out of date and mightn't support the Kobo Glo, Best to get it from the official site. Binary Install here.

sudo -v && wget -nv -O- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kovidgoyal/calibre/master/setup/linux-installer.py | sudo python -c "import sys; main=lambda:sys.stderr.write('Download failed\n'); exec(sys.stdin.read()); main()"

Dilisk

Gamayun,

Thanks for the advice. As it happens, I tried Calibre
(direct from the project's website), but couldn't get it to
work reliably. Most of the time, the Glo would fail to
notice the books transferred by Calibre.

I was generally careful about unmounting and ejecting
the device, so I don't think that was the reason for
the problem.

Anyway, I'm happy with the SD-card method for the time
being.