Aura H2O Is this normal?

[Anak]

Originally Posted by dillsandwitch

it takes forever to finish "PROCESSING CONTENT" I added about 150 books the other day and it took almost an hour for it to finish processing.

Processing books on Kobo devices is known to be very, very slow when compared to other devices.
I can't find the post on the German allesebook.de forum where someone compared processing time of books on several ereaders. The Kobos were by far the slowest. Where other readers needed minutes (range: 12-30 min)* the Kobo needed more than an hour to process the added books.

Note: * from memory

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Anak

Processing books on Kobo devices is known to be very, very slow when compared to other devices.

I'm not so sure of that. Sony Readers process books and So do Kindles. It's just with Kindles, it's done in the background.

[filmo]

My Sony T1 would lock up trying to process thousands of books with covers but if I turned off display covers when viewing library no problems.

[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

I'm not so sure of that. Sony Readers process books and So do Kindles. It's just with Kindles, it's done in the background.

Kindles process books almost instantly to add them to the library, and a separate process indexes them for searching.

Unlike Kobos, you can immediately read them, but once a Kobo finishes processing, I believe you can both read and search?

I don't know whether Kindles or Kobos take longer from the time of sideloading to the time when you can search the books, but it is undoubtedly a lesser difference than the time til you can read the book.

[jackie_w]

I think the lengthy processing time for Kobos is because not only the metadata but the whole content of every chapter of every new book is inserted into the database. I think Sony only inserted the metadata details into its database. I don't know what Kindles do with new books.

[eschwartz]

Kindles just record the metadata into the books database, and the content-for-searching is recorded into a separate database as part of a separate process.

[PeterT]

I don't think Kobo insert the entire contents of a chapter into the database. I do believe that was true back in the days of the original Kobo but hasn't been for a long time.

[eschwartz]

Yeah, that would be inefficient. They probably do the same as the Kindle and store indexes, they just do it in the initial processing step...

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by eschwartz

Yeah, that would be inefficient. They probably do the same as the Kindle and store indexes, they just do it in the initial processing step...

The Kobo's store the metadata and the ToC in the database. There is no way to search the contents of the books except when reading them.

And as a data point for the processing, I bought a H2O a week ago. Because of a fault, I had to exchange it on the weekend and went through the set-up again. I sideloaded about 1200 books both times, but in different ways.

The first time, I did them in batches of about 200. The processing step took about 10 minutes per batch. The second time, I did them in one big batch. That took an hour. So, roughly the same total processing time for the two methods.

I was expecting the single batch to be noticeable worse than the smaller batches. Maybe it needs more books in the batch or more books already on the device to make it noticeable.

And for the record, the fault was one I haven't seen reported. The H2O worked perfectly except if it was put to sleep for more than about 20 seconds. If that happened, when it woke, it didn't respond to any touches. It appeared to be still running as plugging it into the PC would display the connect prompt and the power button worked properly. I tried a few things and couldn't get it working and Kobo agreed it was a fault, so it went back. The replacement is working perfectly.

[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by davidfor

The Kobo's store the metadata and the ToC in the database. There is no way to search the contents of the books except when reading them.

I see.... so no searching across "All books" then? It is a feature I have used a number of times on my Kindle...

[jackie_w]

Originally Posted by PeterT

I don't think Kobo insert the entire contents of a chapter into the database. I do believe that was true back in the days of the original Kobo but hasn't been for a long time.

Apologies, I stand corrected. I remembered I'd seen in the content table, a row with chapter name per html file for each epub (that's quite a lot of rows if you read a lot of James Patterson novels!).

[murg]

Originally Posted by davidfor

I was expecting the single batch to be noticeable worse than the smaller batches. Maybe it needs more books in the batch or more books already on the device to make it noticeable.

I'd expect the two methods to take the same amount of time. They are doing the same processing, and there are no loops inside of loops.