4 GB storage on Kindle?

[desertblues]

Perhaps it's been noted before, if so; excuse me.

The Kindle has 4 GB storage= 3 GB for books/doc/audio + about 1 GB for its 'own' functions, like searching, indexing etc.

Try not to exceed the 3 GB that is left, as the Kindle will go unstable:
- doesn't search anymore: says ' needs a minimum of 25 KB for searching' ,
- keeps asking ' Turn Wireless On'
- starts to index all of your items all over again
- battery empty in one day, etc.

That's what happened when I had 3,24 GB on the Kindle. It was really the limit. It went unstable and almost unmanageable. Rebooting didn't help either, of course. I deleted some audio (PC) and a lot of books (through Calibre) and it's allright now.

So; check your GB's on the Kindle once in a while and keep to <=3GB.

[LUW]

Good to know, thanx for the heads-up!

[desertgrandma]

ouch.

How many books did you have loaded?

Were there audio books as well.......or music?

[bitschnau]

I wonder how you could exceed the user's space for books and media, etc. and why the Kindle did not pay attention to net let that happen?

Maybe you should give amazon a hint to this as they maybe want to fix this issue in future software releases.

kindle-feedback@amazon.com

[TheKindleWorm]

Sounds painful

I have almost 2 GB left to use so long way to go yet!

[desertblues]

Originally Posted by desertgrandma

ouch.

How many books did you have loaded?

Were there audio books as well.......or music?

Well, I use the Kindle as a library/ walk-in closet. I had about 2000 books, gathered over the years; also gathering dust, I gather.
Some audiobooks, some music, all Amazon's free games + scrabble and solitaire.

After a good autumn-cleaning, I decided to use the Kindle for which I bought it = to read without any distractions.
I also have an iPad, iPod, Nintendo DS; so what was I thinking.
I'm good now.

[ski_power]

Originally Posted by TheKindleWorm

Sounds painful

I have almost 2 GB left to use so long way to go yet!

I've got almost 3GB free. I just keep a couple of books on the device. Calibre homeserver is awesome :-)

[Tiersten]

Originally Posted by bitschnau

I wonder how you could exceed the user's space for books and media, etc.

The issues are because it stores some internal data on the media area such as search index files and some of your settings. Moving the index files on the firmware partition instead wouldn't be a good idea either as you may end up with an even worse problem where the Kindle can't start at all.

Originally Posted by bitschnau

why the Kindle did not pay attention to net let that happen?

It can't stop you from filling it up. How would it? When it is in USB drive mode, the Kindle itself doesn't have access to the media area. If it complained at you after you filled up the drive then its a bit late by then anyway. Estimating the size of the search index files would also be difficult without actually generating them first since you can't go by file size alone as you'd overestimate in every case.

If they changed it so that you needed to use a special Kindle sync app and protocol ala iTunes + iPhone then sure, it'd be able to warn you. You'd lose the ability to just plug it in and drag files though.

[curstpriest]

It could disable indexing and delete book indices and tell you that you now need to remove some books for searching to work (index files are like 1/4-1/3 the size of the books)

Another option would be to delete some of your content (older stuff) and send it to "archived items"

[twowheels]

Originally Posted by Tiersten

It can't stop you from filling it up. How would it? When it is in USB drive mode, the Kindle itself doesn't have access to the media area.

If it needs 1GB for its own use after you've filled 3GB of the user space then they should partition the filesystem and only mount the user space when it's plugged in. That also means that they should be advertising it as a 3 GB device, not 4.

[TheKindleWorm]

I love having all my books dumped right onto my Kindle because I do tend to search through them a lot.

However, if space was a problem, I also store all my ebooks on dropbox.com As long as you are online with wifi or 3G, you can access any Kindle-friendly files (mobi, prc and azw) and download them onto your Kindle right from the Kindle web browser.

Process explained in these two posts:
http://www.kinworm.com/2010/10/backu...g-dropbox.html

http://www.kinworm.com/2010/10/downl...s-to-your.html

[tomsem]

Originally Posted by TheKindleWorm

I love having all my books dumped right onto my Kindle because I do tend to search through them a lot.

However, if space was a problem, I also store all my ebooks on dropbox.com As long as you are online with wifi or 3G, you can access any Kindle-friendly files (mobi, prc and azw) and download them onto your Kindle right from the Kindle web browser.

Process explained in these two posts:

http://www.thekindleworm.com/2010/10...g-dropbox.html

http://www.thekindleworm.com/2010/10...s-to-your.html

Or calibre content server.

The fly in this ointment is that it doesn't work with PDF, or CBZ/ZIP (image file containers) which are generally larger and if they could be downloaded on demand, would confer more benefit in terms of storage savings. Wish Amazon would allow these to download, at least over wifi.

[Tiersten]

Originally Posted by twowheels

If it needs 1GB for its own use after you've filled 3GB of the user space then they should partition the filesystem and only mount the user space when it's plugged in.

It already does that. The partitions for firmware and user data are separate. The user space is formatted as a FAT32 partition so it works as a USB drive.

The issues in this thread are because the user area is full and it doesn't like that happening. What I'm saying is that you can't make it prevent you from filling up the user area.

Originally Posted by twowheels

That also means that they should be advertising it as a 3 GB device, not 4.

Yes. Unfortunately everybody measures it based on total storage inside the device and not the usable storage.

[curstpriest]

Originally Posted by twowheels

If it needs 1GB for its own use after you've filled 3GB of the user space then they should partition the file system and only mount the user space when it's plugged in. That also means that they should be advertising it as a 3 GB device, not 4.

They do, pay attention.

Holds Over 3,500 Books
The ultimate travel companion, Kindle weighs 8.5 ounces and holds up to 3,500 books. No longer pick and choose which books fit in your carry-on. You can always have your entire Kindle library with you.

Go to TECHNICAL DETAILS

4GB internal (approximately 3GB available for user content).

You actually get 3.2gb of internal space, and that's not the 3.2gb before formatting, that's actually 3.2gb of usable space after a usable file system is in place.

I know the first thing I did was look @ the features list, and then scroll down to the technical details. I was disappointed that my DXG didn't have an SD slot, but 3gb is still a lot of room for ebooks, even pdfs rarely go over 15mb unless they are pirated scans.

Note that most books are ~ 500k-1mb, so after indexing we'll assume the average 200-300 page novel is 1mb. They assume that the average consumer doesn't know what a MB/GB is or how big an ebook will be. Similarly to how music players/media players can hold 2000 "songs."

AS far as downloading other files via webbrowser, can't you just make your server repackage the files in an archive and rename it to .zip.mobi, and then have a kindle script/kindlet extract the .zip.mobi files. I'm pretty sure the browser would be stupid enough to download them. My 2c. I'd use an archive because text documents can be compressed quite a bit, but you could just straight rename them... Myfile.pdf.mobi or if the double dots confuse it...

have some php script that serves your files like so:
myfile.pdf -> myfile_-typepdf.mobi

download file
basic script that replaces "_-typepdf.mobi" -> .pdf
use whatever string you want really, I bet it would work.

Also, can you use other tools such as ftp/telnet/wget on the kindle to get files over wlan? Haven't tried.

[desertblues]

Darn; my Kindle has gone to heaven. Reboot, reset to factory default.....useless.

Phoned Amazpn this very morning from overseas; they managed to get it re-registred, but that's it. All it does is going from Users Guide to Amazon.com and back.

They'll send me another one;it will arrive.....between the 10th and 21 of january next year, because it has to be an international Kindle for Europe.

Is it because I loaded too many books? I mean, 2000 read and unread. I gathered the books, most of them classics/freebies over the years and I read 4 languages; always read a lot.

So again: take care overloading your Kindle, as it doesn't warn you that you've reached your limit= about 3 GB.