Originally Posted by HarryT
I bought my KO2 mainly so I could have a larger proportion of my Ebook library (which is in Calibre) on it. I’ve learnt a few things over the last 48h which may be of interest to others, so I thought I’d share them.
Firstly, you need to know how to check if the Kindle is currently busy indexing books. To do this, tap the “search” box from the library screen, and enter a nonsense search string. When the results screen appears (which will show zero matches if you’ve entered a random nonsense search string) if “Text in Books” is highlighted, tap it, and it will say “NNN books not yet indexed” (should that be the case). Tap that line, and it’ll show you what the books are.
1. The Kindle’s behaviour is erratic while it’s indexing. Tap a book in the library, and it may take a very long time to open, or the entire device may appear to hang up. That’s because the CPU is busy indexing. If it does appear to have hung up, press the power button, wait about a minute, then press it again. That should bring things back to life again. Because of this, I’d strongly suggest waiting for the Kindle to finish indexing before using it.
2. Indexing is CPU-intensive, and hence power-hungry. When indexing, the Kindle will probably drain the battery in well under a day. Leave it connected to a wall-charger while it’s indexing.
3. The Kindle can index approximately 100 books an hour (depending on their size). Do as I (foolishly) did and load 2000 books at once, and the Kindle will be tied up for around 24h indexing them! It’s a lot better to load batches of around 100 books at a time and wait for each batch to finish indexing before loading the next batch. Another reason to do this is...
4. The indexing process can very occasionally hang up (it’s not happened to me on the KO2, but it has on earlier Kindles). If the number of books remaining to be indexed freezes for an hour or more, try rebooting the Kindle. If that still doesn’t free up the indexer, you’ll need to delete the books that are awaiting indexing and re-add them. That’s why it’s advisable to add your books in fairly small batches, and also add them in identifiable batches (eg authors starting with a certain letter), so you’ll know what to delete! Before panicking, though, note that very large books (such as some of the enormous Delphi collections) can take a very long time to index. If your recent batch of books contains a 50MB Delphi omnibus, don’t worry if the indexer appears to freeze for half an hour - it’s just processing that huge book.
5. The more books you have on your Kindle, the longer newly-added books will take to index. I’ve found that with 3000 books on my KO2, indexing is about 50% slower than it was when the device was empty.
After two days, I’ve loaded authors with surnames up to the letter “I” on my Kindle (some 3500 books), so it’s probably going to take another 3 or 4 days to finish loading my library.
The good news is that the Kindle performs very well with large numbers of books in the library (provided it’s finished indexing them!). Nothing obvious slows down in normal use. Searches are very quick, and books open virtually instantly.
Based on what I’ve loaded so far, a rough calculation suggests that it would probably be possible to store around 13-14000 books on the 32GB KO2. A significant proportion of my books, though, are (very) large omnibus editions, which pushes my average book size up a lot. If you read short novels, you could probably fit 20,000+ on!
Hope that’s of some interest to others.
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