Readers go haywire when new?

[speakingtohe]

Originally Posted by Anthem

While others keep ludicrous amounts of books on their devices I am in the middle. I feel no need whatsoever to keep my entire library on any of my devices. There is quite literally no reason that I can think of to keep my entire library of books on me. 'Specially when Amazon has that nifty cloud thing they keep a 'talkin' about.

But as backup, I understand. However, if you want mere backup of the files, perhaps just copy all of your books, or the directory that all of the books are stored in to a USB drive. And then a cloud service such as Google Drive. Local backups combined with network backups provides for a fair amount of redundancy.

Some of us don't always have access to the internet. There are areas I have worked in recent years with no cell phone coverage and no regular phone service. Just radio phones which don't carry data well even for dialup. Plus no bookstores or libraries. This is the main reason I got an ereader initially.

But I don't have to have a ludicrous amount of books on my reader most of the time. I prefer to as I am very mood driven as to my choice and if I am wanting to read a specific book I prefer to have it already on my reader where I can select it in seconds. More often than not when I finish a book, another pops into my mind. I don't want to sync to the cloud or sideload from my computer at 2AM when I am snuggled down in bed. If I am in a doctor's office or on a bus I don't want to wait till I get home. Often I do, as my brain might be demanding a book not on my reader, and of course I just read something else instead.

Lots of people only want the book they are currently reading and maybe a second, some want 10, some want 52 etc. They have their reasons although I cannot quite fathom them. I know people who throw out a book as soon as they read it and one guy I know generally has only 5 or 6 food items in his cupboards at a time even though he eats at home frequently. He'll toss a can of soup if he has it for more than a week.

I used to have four giant shelves and 20+ boxes of paper books. A few people thought this was odd, but most were not indignant about it, or were polite enough to keep it to themselves if they were. (you are not being indignant or impolite in case I seem to imply that BTW).

Generally I keep between 800-2000 books on a reader, but being curious I have put quite a few more on just to see if they choked. Sonys don't choke, kindles don't choke, Kobos do.

I fail to understand why I shouldn't have them on my reader. That is how I read them. If I still had a few thousand paper books, I wouldn't keep them in another location, even in the basement by choice.

Helen

[Tarana]

I too think that your problem is that it is indexing.

I'm not saying you shouldn't keep all those books on your ereader (it slows some of mine down), but you should have a backup on a flashdrive kept somewhere off your property in case of fire or other calamity. You never know when that is going to happen or in what form. Of course, the biggest hassle is to remove the DRM, but I do that as a matter of course when I buy an ebook. I learned the lesson. Lots of people have lost their ebooks when a publisher shuts down.

[QuantumIguana]

The only ludicrous number of books to have on the e-reader is more books than you want to have. If I put them on there and kept them on there, it must not be ludicrous to have them there.

I don't keep as many books on my Kindle as I used to, but it is very appealing to have a large library at my fingertips. If I had opted for 3G, I would be much more inclined to have less books on there than I currently have.

[Anthem]

Originally Posted by speakingtohe

I know people who throw out a book as soon as they read it and one guy I know generally has only 5 or 6 food items in his cupboards at a time even though he eats at home frequently. He'll toss a can of soup if he has it for more than a week.

That's interesting. I was watching an interview and the guy being interviewed claimed that he knew a guy back in college or something that would literally rip his comics and books in half when he finished reading them. Maybe some sort of "I'm done!" ritual? I have no idea. But interesting, all the same.

If your e-reader has the capacity and you want to take your whole library with you than that is perfectly fine. Just make sure you have the necessary storage space and that you give the machine time to do it's thing. I know that I have the best luck with my 2013 Paperwhite by downloading books one at a time, or just a few at a time. You can literally watch the battery leak away as it indexes the contents of even a few books.

The processors in these puppies are featherweights compared to many tablets and even low end computers, so they need babying. But I know for a fact that the Paperwhite, at least, can handle huge libraries. I also loaded my Kobo Wifi and my Sony PRS-350 with huge libraries a few years back and they handled it perfectly fine, so I imagine any more modern e-reader should be perfectly OK. As backup, I would recommend one of the other solutions.

Happy reading!

[ProfCrash]

I downloaded 433 books on my PW2. It took about five minutes. I downloaded my collections from my K3 after I downloaded the books. A few minutes later, most of the 433 books were sorted into collections. It took me about five minutes to sort the ones that had not been in a collection.

The battery didn't last all that long with the first download but since then the battery has been fine.

The process of indexing a large number of books can take a while. I was ready for there to be issues due to the large number of books but there was not. My K3 took a lot longer to index and get set up but that was a few years back. I can see some e-readers having problem with the large number of books some of us download. Next time, try downloading in batches of 50 or so.

As for the number of books, I carry what I am comfortable carrying on my device. I don't have all of my books. The ones I know I am not going to read or re-read I leave on the cloud. If I think I might want to read it again or that someone I know might want to read it, I leave it on my Kindle. So I have 450 books on my PW2, actually it is more then that since I have about 7 complete works of and those volumes contain lots and lots of books and short stories.

If the Zombie apocolypse comes, I want to know that I can read what I like when not running from Zombies. I just need to hit REI and pick up a portable solar battery charger...