Kobo has replaced the system that keeps your place in a book in step across devices, but the Kobo sync fix won’t reach your account on its own. You have to trigger it once on every device you read on, and most coverage skips that step. The work happened on Kobo’s servers, with no firmware release. Chief executive Michael Tamblyn described it publicly on September 10, 2026.
Tamblyn’s thread on the rebuild
Tamblyn posted a thread about the change late on September 10, 2026, and answered follow-up questions the next morning. Kobo “rebuilt the entire bookmarking and progress syncing system from the ground up,” he wrote. He also said the old system dated back to the company’s earliest e-readers and sat in a corner of the code base nobody wanted to touch.
That second detail explains the long wait, because sync bugs survive for years when the code behind them is risky to change. Kobo didn’t ship a version number or release notes with this work. The announcement came from Tamblyn’s own social account, with no formal press release, so treat the technical details here as his summary.
Who this affects
The change matters to a narrow group, as Tamblyn said himself. You need at least two things signed in to the same Kobo account, either an e-reader plus a phone or tablet app, or two e-readers. If you read on one device only, the old system never had a conflict to resolve. You saw no problem then, and you won’t notice a difference now.
Everyone else knows the symptom well. Say you read forty pages on your phone during a commute. That evening you pick up the e-reader and land back where you were two days ago. The reverse happened too, with the app ignoring progress made on the e-reader.
Steps on a Kobo e-reader
Kobo already had a tool for this, buried deep in the settings. On a Kobo e-reader, go to your Home screen, tap the More icon at the bottom, then Settings, then Device information. Beside “Repair your Kobo account,” tap Repair, then Repair now.
Connect to Wi-Fi first. Kobo warns that the process can take a while on a large library, because the e-reader re-downloads missing books and covers as part of the repair. Signing out of your account and back in does the same job, but Tamblyn said the Repair option is usually quicker.
Steps in the Kobo apps
The apps have no Repair button in the same place, so the route is simpler. Sign out of your Kobo account, then sign back in. Do it in the phone app, the tablet app and Kobo Desktop, wherever you’re signed in.
You do this once per device, and after that the account stays on the new system. Skip a device and it keeps the old behavior. That defeats the point, because sync only works when both ends agree.
The reason for the manual step
Tamblyn explained that signing out or repairing “lets us reload and rebuild your library with all new progress tokens.” A progress token is the record Kobo keeps of where you are in a book. The old tokens are in the old format, so the server can’t reinterpret them.
He described the new system as “a thoroughly modern way of figuring out which change to a book’s progress is most recent.” That’s the hard part of any sync design. Two devices both claim a position, and the server has to decide which claim is newer and which should win. Kobo hasn’t published the technical design behind the new approach, so the exact conflict rules are still unconfirmed.
Sideloaded books stay outside the fix
A reader asked Tamblyn directly about sideloaded files. His short answer was that the fix doesn’t cover them, though he added that a person can dream.
EPUB files you copied over by USB, books from Standard Ebooks and anything else you didn’t get through Kobo still won’t share reading positions between devices. The gap is an old one, and it survived a rebuild of everything around it. An open reader such as the Kobo Libra Colour makes sideloading a drag-and-drop job, and the sync system still ignores the books you add that way.
Highlights, notes and purchases during a repair
Kobo’s help page describes account repair as a way to recover missing books and covers. It doesn’t say what a repair does to highlights, notes or bookmarks, so there’s no word from Kobo on whether annotations survive untouched. If you annotate heavily, you may prefer to check one book’s notes after the first repair, before running it on every device.
The repair doesn’t remove purchases, since anything tied to your account downloads again. The work sits on the server side, so a firmware update won’t deliver this change.
If positions still disagree
Start by checking that every signed-in device has been repaired, or signed out and back in. One forgotten tablet explains most of the complaints that remain. Then open the book on each device and let it finish syncing before you close the app. A position that never uploads can’t arrive anywhere else.
If one title still misbehaves after that, check whether it’s a sideloaded copy. That question settles the majority of cases, because sideloaded files sit outside the fix.
Is it worth doing now?
Do it now if you read across devices. It takes a few minutes and one Wi-Fi session per device, and it ends a long-running annoyance. Anyone who reads on one e-reader alone can skip it and lose nothing.
