Just don’t connect it to a network. Calibre to manage your library, transfer books via USB, done. Kobo+Calibre works fine on Linux.

However, in rare cases Kobo devices can be a bit funny with displaying covers properly without internet access to fetch/correct them “automatically”. This is not privacy friendly, obviously.

YMMV with this issue, but regardless if you choose a Kobo or not, I’ll drop some handy tips for you below just in case you care to polish your experience via Calibre.

I can’t give credit for below cause this is copied from my notes and I don’t know the author/source. Enjoy.

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Calibre is so powerful and customizable that it has a bewildering amount of options and ways to do things. I wanted to scrape good metadata and covers for my ebook library in the simplest way I could. Here’s my procedure:

PREPARING THE MEDATA SOURCES (This only needs to be done once)

1. Go to Preferences -> Get plugins to enhance Calibre -> find and install the ‘Kindle hi-res covers’ and ‘Goodreads’ plugins. Reboot Calibre.

2. With your library open in Calibre, choose a selection of ebooks -> Ctrl+D to download metadata and covers -> configure download.

3. On the lower right hand side, I set ‘Max. number of tags to download:’ at 4. This is personal preference.

4. The only sources to have check marks (with their corresponding cover priority) should be:

   • Goodreads: 3

     • almost always has the best metadata, and is best for tags, which I limit to 4

   • Google Images: 2

     • While selected: Configure selected source -> [Choose your preferred cover size and max number of covers to retrieve - I up it to 10]

     • If you end up choosing the covers individually Google often has good covers the other sources don’t

   • Kindle hi-res covers: 1

     • It usually has the best covers but can be a pain because it often picks a foreign cover and you have to go choose the cover individually afterwards.

     • I change the maximum number of covers to get from 5 to 10, but that’s not necessary.

PREPARING THE EBOOKS FOR SCRAPING COVERS AND METADATA

I clear all the ‘Rating’, Tags’ and ‘Series’ fields because the data may be from all over the place (tags are often particularly awful), but Goodreads metadata will standardize it (as far as it can be for my liking, anyway - they seem to have a finite and well-ordered number of tags unlike many other sources). You can clear other fields but I only do those three.

1. Select your books -> Right-click -> Edit metadata -> Edit metadata in bulk

2. For ‘Rating:’ select ‘Not rated’ from the dropdown and then check ‘Apply rating’ on the right

3. Also on the right side, check ‘Remove all’ on the ‘Remove tags:’ row and ‘Clear series’ below it.

TO GET COVERS

1. Select the ebooks you want to scrape and press Ctrl+D -> Download only covers.

   • If I choose ‘Download both’ I usually have to reject many because the cover is foreign or something, and then I end up scraping the metadata separately anyway.

2. When the job is done -> Review downloaded metadata -> Check ‘Mark rejected books’ (this option will stay selected in the future) then go through the books, pressing ‘Reject’ for any books that don’t have a satisfactory cover.

3. After finishing the selections, the marked books will show. Select them all -> Right click - > select ‘Edit metadata individually’

4. Press ‘Download cover’, select a cover, and press ‘Next’ until finished

5. Select all the rejected books and press Ctrl-M to toggle the marked (pinned) status to off

   • I put the ‘Mark books’ icon in the main toolbar with Preferences -> Toolbars & menus -> select ‘The main toolbar’ from the dropdown and move the ‘Mark books’ icon to the column on the right

6. Press the X at the end of the search bar to clear the selection and get back to the main book list.

   • If you don’t see the search bar add it by pressing ‘Layout’ at the bottom right and toggling ‘Search bar’ to ‘Show’.

Rather than using the above steps, if I have some free time I like to select ALL the covers manually, because it can be fun to look at the different choices. Sometimes I’ll pick a foreign cover because the art is better. (Also many of the larger covers - especially from Kindle hi-res - are actually much blurrier than some smaller choices and you can’t tell from the thumbnails so I like to right-click and compare them at full size) To do it this way, instead of doing step 1 above:

1. Select the ebooks you want to scrape -> Right-click -> Edit metadata -> Edit metadata individually

2. Do Step 4. That will be the last step

TO GET METADATA

1. Select the books you want to scrape and press Ctrl+D -> Download only metadata.

2. When the job is done -> ‘Review downloaded metadata’ OR ‘Yes’

   • If I DO review the metadata, I usually only check the comments, because I can usually trust the metadata from GoodReads

3. OPTIONAL: If any of the metadata you reviewed is unsatisfactory, ‘Reject’ it when reviewing, then do step 3 from the ‘TO GET COVERS’ section, then go to step 4 but select ‘Download Metadata’ instead of cover and follow the instructions from there.

You should now be finished selecting metadata for your selected books!