K4 Collections - Can somebody explain how they work?

Hello! I'm going to eventually update my K3, but I rely very, very heavily on collections (big series reader) - at present I have 18 collections, and once I get my hands on all of the Terry Pratchett books and Forgotten Realms everythings (I'll be organising them by story arcs rather than "Discworld", and by separate anthologies / series rather than "Forgotten Realms"), it's going to be ... well, very massive.

I've heard that the K4 only has 30mb of dedicated room for collections - is this for the name of the collection, or for everything inside the collection? How many collections can you create on 30mb, if it doesn't include everything inside the collection? I have no idea how collections work, but I've heard that this a lot smaller than the collection space on the K3 - and my K3 is already a bit chugged-down because of the 18 collections I have.

Finally, is there a difference between the collection sizes for the K4NT and the K4T?

[soulfuldog]

I've never heard of any kind of dedicated space for collections on any model of Kindle?

It is true that anything with a hard drive only has so much of the space available for the user (system files like the software that runs the Kindle needs it's own space), so for example the Kindle 3 and the Kindle Touch have 4GB in total, but only 3GB is available to use, whereas the Kindle NT is smaller it has 2GB in total, and about 1.25GB available.

Collections are just tags anyway, so they don't really take up much room. What might slow the Kindle down is if you have hundreds of books in each of those collections. They may advertise they can a few thousand books, but they do tend to slow down if you have a lot stored on your Kindle.

Thank you for that - but I do know about how computers work As far as the dedicated space, I've only heard of it here on mobileread, which is why I was hoping that somebody would be able to come along and explain just what they meant when they said it. ^_^

What I'm speaking of is the fact that, apparently, the system files for the collections have been moved in the KT - and the space that they've been moved to can only hold up to 30mb before the KT bricks. 30mb is not much at all when you have a collection addiction like mine.

[soulfuldog]

In that case, try posting your query in the Kindle Developer's Corner, as they're more likely to know than anyone else on here! Otherwise, you could try Kindle support to see if they can shed any light on it?

However, I do think you are worrying unnecessarily, even if it was limited to 30MB, that is an awful lot of text, millions of characters.

[Joykins]

I have a k4nt and I don't think 18 collections itself would be a problem. I have 12 collections and am using probably half the Kindle's memory capacity, and I haven't had any speed problems whatsoever. I think the "Collections" memory must be collections metadata (i.e. the names and a reference to the titles within them) and not the content of the books in them, so I wouldn't worry about it.

[dilo_sec]

I organize in Author/Series folders - with books named in Number/Title fashion.

Author 01
- 01 Title1.mobi
- 02 Title2.mobi

I also update the metadata tag 'dc:Title' and EXTH record 'UpdatedTitle' to use the filename, e.g. '01 Title1' (without the mobi extension) there are tools that will generate collections based on above.

As mentioned, the systems/collections.json file simply contains SHA-1 hash tags of the fullpaths of files.

e.g. /mnt/us/documents/Author 01/01 Title.mobi generates this:
{
"Author 01@en-US":{
"items":[
"*c8af0bfb05ddd4512e5ce1c475a2761588d45956"
]},
}

I have about 400 files in about 60 collections - the collections.jason file is only about 25KB.

[Ved]

I've been looking for a thread on the best ways to organize collections in Kindle 4 but no luck so far. Hope my post will be useful for this thread.

I use ICE Book Reader Professional to read books on my PC. The program can sort books by author, then series, then the title. You can add notes and it has some other things that allows users to easily find a book.

Unfortunately, Kindle 4 NT is very limited in that respect. Kindle Collections feature does not support book series AFAIK. After a day of frustration I overcame that restriction.

Now my books inside a collection look like this


The name of the collection is the name of the author of all the books inside the collections. The book series you can see on the right side are actually author names in metadata fields of a specific book.

I exported my books from ICE Book Reader, imported them to Calibre, converted to MOBI format, copypasted via USB to Kindle, and created collections using Kindle Collection Manager.

The trick is having Calibre treat the names of book series as book authors during import and exporting converted books into a book author folder. After that Kindle Collection Manager can easily create a collection named exactly as a specific folder.

It won't be as handy for those, who already have set up their collections but it may give a hint to anyone, who wants their books stored a bit better.