Thanks, Harry, that's encouraging.
Maybe the breakage here didn't happen at the number of pages or megabytes but the number of words - as Mobi allows you to look up any word in any book, it seems that some kind of reference has to be collated into the dictionaries for any given file, and maybe that was the wall I hit.
Speculative Project I won't have time for:
Make a mobi file with several hundred html files, each with only 1 unique word in it, at High Compression. I'm betting that will just work just fine.
Making the Complete Works of all these guys, I'll bet, just won't:
20 Most Prolific Authors and Writers in Literary History
1. MARY FAULKNER (1903-1973) 904 books
2. LAURAN PAINE (b. 1916) 850 + books
3. PRENTISS INGRAHAM (1843-1904) 600 + books
4. JOZEF IGNACY KRASZEWSKI (1812-1887) 600 + books
5. ENID MARY BLYTON (1900?-1968) 600 books
6. JOHN CREASEY (1908-1973) 564 books
7. SUYUTI (1445-1505) 561 books
8. URSULA BLOOM (b. 1898?) 520 + books
9. GEORGES SIMENON (b. 1903) 500 + books
10. HOWARD ROGER GARIS (1873-1962) 500 + books
11. ARTHUR WILLIAM GROOM (1898-1964) 400 + books
11. EDWARD ZANE CARROLL JUDSON (1823-1886) 400 + books
12. EDWARD L. STRATEMEYER (1862-1930) 400 + books
13. BAKIN (1767-1848) 300 + books
14. EVELYN EVERETT GREEN (1856-1932) 300 + books
15. NIGEL MORLAND (b. 1905) 300 + books
17. D. S. ROWLAND (b. 1928) 286 + books
18. BARBARA CARTLAND (b. 1902) 280 ± books
19. ALEXANDRE DUMAS pere (1802-1870) 277 books
20. L. T. MEADE (1854-1914) 258 books
(from
http://www.trivia-library.com/c/20-m...ry-history.htm )
Odd, isn't it, that before the ease-of-book-creation era (i.e., now), there were people who seriously writing lots and lots of books, whereas now, well, not so much......
-bjc