MobileRead Forums - View Single Post - Tips for loading a large library onto a KO2

HarryT · 11-09-2017, 04:44 PM

Ok, I’ve finally, after nine days, finished loading my library (or what I want to have on my Kindle, at least) onto my KO2. A total of 8636 books occupying 20GB of storage. That’s an average of 2.5MB per book, which is high because the books include a hundred or so VERY large Delphi omnibus editions. The largest book I have loaded is a little over 200MB in size. My Kindle still has 7GB free storage space.

So, how does it work with that many books on? Generally speaking, pretty well. Paging through the library is fast (all 1080 pages of it!), and searching for book titles returns all matching titles pretty well instantly. No problems reading. No crashes, hang-ups, or any other strange behaviour.

Some issues, which are a consequence of library size:

One issue is that searching in books takes quite a long time. Not too surprising with 20GB of content to search. Eg if I open Joe Abercrombie’s “First Law Trilogy” (a very large book!) and search for the word “sword”, it takes 64s to return the 546 matches. Edit: the search speed is constant; searching for any word or phrase in any book, long or short, takes 60-65s. Must be related to the total size of the index, I guess.

Doing a global search for words across all books just plain doesn’t work. It probably would return results eventually, but it hadn’t done so after waiting 10m. Again not too surprising, and this is a facility I don’t use.

As I mentioned above, searching for book titles or authors works fine and returns results pretty much instantly. Eg if I search for the word “hope”, it finds the 28 books in my library which contain “hope” either in the author’s name or the title in less than 2s.

Another issue is that when you connect to the PC, and add or delete books, when you disconnect the USB cable, the library takes about 10 minutes to fully update. Just a question of searching through that many books to see what’s changed, I guess.

So, an interesting experiment. You can put 8500 books on your 32GB Kindle (you could put 3x that number of normal-sized novels, easily) and it works fine as a reader, but word search within a book is quite slow, and global word search effectively unusable. Realistically, you can load about 1000 books a day, allowing for indexing, so take a month off if you plan to load your 30,000 books!

Is it worth doing? On balance, yes, for me personally. Global word search is something I don’t use, so the lack of that is no big deal for me. I’m happy with the outcome - I can finally have as much of my library as I want on my Kindle.

Hope this experiment is of some interest to others! Now to actually do some reading

. I’ll keep track of battery life, and see how that goes.

11-09-2017, 04:44 PM	#47
HarryT eBook Enthusiast Posts: 85,557 Karma: 93980341 Join Date: Nov 2006 Location: UK Device: Kindle Oasis 2, iPad Pro 10.5", iPhone 6	Ok, I’ve finally, after nine days, finished loading my library (or what I want to have on my Kindle, at least) onto my KO2. A total of 8636 books occupying 20GB of storage. That’s an average of 2.5MB per book, which is high because the books include a hundred or so VERY large Delphi omnibus editions. The largest book I have loaded is a little over 200MB in size. My Kindle still has 7GB free storage space. So, how does it work with that many books on? Generally speaking, pretty well. Paging through the library is fast (all 1080 pages of it!), and searching for book titles returns all matching titles pretty well instantly. No problems reading. No crashes, hang-ups, or any other strange behaviour. Some issues, which are a consequence of library size: One issue is that searching in books takes quite a long time. Not too surprising with 20GB of content to search. Eg if I open Joe Abercrombie’s “First Law Trilogy” (a very large book!) and search for the word “sword”, it takes 64s to return the 546 matches. Edit: the search speed is constant; searching for any word or phrase in any book, long or short, takes 60-65s. Must be related to the total size of the index, I guess. Doing a global search for words across all books just plain doesn’t work. It probably would return results eventually, but it hadn’t done so after waiting 10m. Again not too surprising, and this is a facility I don’t use. As I mentioned above, searching for book titles or authors works fine and returns results pretty much instantly. Eg if I search for the word “hope”, it finds the 28 books in my library which contain “hope” either in the author’s name or the title in less than 2s. Another issue is that when you connect to the PC, and add or delete books, when you disconnect the USB cable, the library takes about 10 minutes to fully update. Just a question of searching through that many books to see what’s changed, I guess. So, an interesting experiment. You can put 8500 books on your 32GB Kindle (you could put 3x that number of normal-sized novels, easily) and it works fine as a reader, but word search within a book is quite slow, and global word search effectively unusable. Realistically, you can load about 1000 books a day, allowing for indexing, so take a month off if you plan to load your 30,000 books! Is it worth doing? On balance, yes, for me personally. Global word search is something I don’t use, so the lack of that is no big deal for me. I’m happy with the outcome - I can finally have as much of my library as I want on my Kindle. Hope this experiment is of some interest to others! Now to actually do some reading . I’ll keep track of battery life, and see how that goes. Last edited by HarryT; 11-09-2017 at 06:07 PM.