[doubleshuffle]

Prompted by a bug in the current Kobo firmware, in which the TOC only works properly when each chapter has its own file, I have been forced to rethink my approach to this problem.

After experiences with a few bought books with hundreds of individual files that were very slow and worked much better after I had merged a lot of those files, I had come to the conclusion that it was better to have fewer files with several chapters in them.

However, in the books I recently made I used an individual file for each chapter, ending up with many hundreds of files (poetry collections!) and the books work just fine, perhaps even a bit snappier than with fewer, larger files.

So what slows a book down? Is it many links inside files? Between files? What's your experience?

(Obviously, even if many small files should turn out to be the better solution, Kobo still must fix that bug. Sometimes you just need the option to have a chapter break without a page break, and that's just not possible if you have each chapter in its own file.)