Adding / Synchronize contents
Reading time aye?
Last updated
Reading time aye?
Last updated
There are two main distinct way to add a book with oboku. You can either add a book manually or let oboku synchronize it automatically.
You can pick any contents from your device and add it directly to the app. By doing so the book will be saved to your library but the book file will only be available on that specific device. oboku does not store any content on its server. If you want to access a book from your other device you need to use one of the other following methods.
If you are on computer you can also drop a file directly onto the app. This will automatically open the screen to add a book.
If you have a book stored and accessible through an uri (eg: ), you can copy paste this uri directly and oboku will use the uri (in the above case ) as source to download the book. You will be able to access the book from any of your device as long as the uri is accessible.
The other methods to add a book uses external services (providers) and will vary in term of UI. Using Google Drive or dropbox will for example prompt you with their own picker. There will be more choice over time once more providers will be implemented on oboku. When using such providers you will also have access to your content everywhere however you will sometime be prompted with a login screen since oboku needs permission to access theses services on your behalf.
The last option is in fact the most convenient one. Assuming you store your book in a supported data source (ex Google Drive), you will be able to create a link for that data source and have oboku synchronize all your content autimatically.
As for now oboku does not triggers a synchronization itself, you will always need to manually trigger it whenever you made changes on your data source. The synchronization itself is automatic, not the trigger.
We may at some point watch and trigger synchronizations automatically but because this will increase the cost of operating significantly this feature is on hold for the moment.
Synchronizing from data sources can be challenging, especially when it comes to avoid duplicate contents. You may have various data sources pointing to the same files or have shared files available in several directories. You can also decide to move a file that was previously synchronized to a different folder in your cloud provider.
We can avoid duplication of contents or re-attach things by trying to assign a unique ID to the resources. This ID is not an oboku ID, it is a unique ID which is related to a specific provider.
We also use the UURID to infer the URI of a resource independently from the data source. For example, once a book is synchronized from a data source X, you should be able to access it whether or not the data source still exists. This way we are able to infer the type of provider to use and the URI to access it.
Some cloud providers such as Google Drive or Dropbox already have a unique ID but other providers like webdav does not. We try to identify contents in a unique way the best we can but it's not always perfect.