Quote:
Originally Posted by GlenBarrington
I am always surprised when I hear that people have enormous numbers of books on their reader.
I think if I were an engineer designing eReaders, I too would not consider designing for performance when managing Library sized colections of books.
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The Sony store
advertises, "512MB of onboard memory lets you carry up to 350 of your favorite books at a time and with dual memory expansion card slots, your reading library is virtually limitless."
Why advertise a "virtually limitless" library (which I'll agree is, within the range of ads, accurate--1500 books fit easily onto even a small memory card), if the device isn't actually functional with them?
Since ebook readers first came out, they were hyped as "hundreds of books at your fingertips!" (Well, most of them. The *very* earliest were hyped as "dozens of books at your fingertips!") I'd expect to be obvious to any engineer that a substantial portion of users would want to put their entire digital libraries on the device, and boot time & file navigation should both consider that fact when designing software.
I keep about 450 books on my Sony. When I get near 500, I notice a great deal of slowdown, and purge some, which annoys me. I like keeping entire fanfic series on the device; I can re-read my favorites at will. Some of them are very short "ebooks;" 3-10k word stories. I can combine them into one big book, but that loses the impact of reading them separately.