How I got 4000 plus books to show

[pilotbob]

Originally Posted by sealbeater

Really? You can only read one book at a time?

Yes, I can only read ONE book at a time. Yes, I can also have several partly read at one time. But really, how many at a time do you have going? 3, 10? You can fit 2000 or so on the current Kindle2 memory.

Once again, read what I wrote. Everything in life is a compromise. If you want a device that stores all your books, get one... more power to ya!

BOb

[sealbeater]

Originally Posted by lilac_jive

I can't keep more than 60 books on my Sony without freaking me out. Every two weeks I delete books I have read, otherwise I get massively confused. I've never even gotten close to using 50% of the base memory.

I just can't understand the need for having that much memory other than the fact that you can (or can't, as the case may be). I'll concede for music, but I don't think a lot of people use that function.

That's the thing I like a lot about my Reader. I can keep what I want on my PC and transfer what I want to read when I want to read it (but still have plenty of room for those "maybe I'll get in the mood for this" books).

Well...its not that you "can" keep what you want on your pc etc etc, it's that you *have to* keep what you want on your pc, etc etc because the hardware (which is perfectly capable) is limited by the software. Good for you for being satisfied with your reader, personally I want more. I don't get confused at the thought of having more than 60 books, I think if I can stick an 8 gig memory card in the reader, it should read 8 gigs of books. That's truth in advertising. They should have a sign on the box that says "if you are serious about using this thing to read books, get something else because we can't handle it" That's ok, replacement firmware is the answer.

[sealbeater]

Originally Posted by pilotbob

Yes, I can only read ONE book at a time. Yes, I can also have several partly read at one time. But really, how many at a time do you have going? 3, 10? You can fit 2000 or so on the current Kindle2 memory.

Once again, read what I wrote. Everything in life is a compromise. If you want a device that stores all your books, get one... more power to ya!

BOb

Who knows, lots. I can fit 4000 on the PRS-505, so what does the Kindle 2 have to do with anything? I'm just pissed it's not 6000 the way it should be. I am finding ways to achieve it. Everything in life is a compromise if you compromise yourself. I choose not to.

[sealbeater]

Originally Posted by lilac_jive

Sealbeater, you can read more than one book at a time on the Reader. When you switch, bookmark. Either open the book again or go to your bookmarks page (to see all books you have bookmarked).

And you have me at a loss for words.

Sorry for the loss of words, didn't mean to. I made mad use of the bookmark feature, I've had 6 pages of bookmarks, it's the only way I've been able to handle that many books.

[bkilian]

Originally Posted by sealbeater

Sorry for the loss of words, didn't mean to. I made mad use of the bookmark feature, I've had 6 pages of bookmarks, it's the only way I've been able to handle that many books.

I'm always impressed to see how different peoples reading styles are. I could never keep track of the storylines of more than one book at a time. Good luck with your quest.

[el.astrologo]

Hey guys, I honestly don't get what's the big deal about this thread that's keeping it 4 pages long and still going. Sealbeater did a good script that makes him happy and he shared it with us...

I'm a med student and I would love to have all my books on medicine and journals with me all the time for reference (and I intend to do so when I get my PRS 700 on march 5th) and I also read for recreational purposes so I'm thinking the internal memory might get tight real fast. I mean, sure, I don't expect to get anywhere near 4000 books but it feels nice knowing that if I were so inclined I could just use Sealbeater's method and get them in.

Not all of us have the urgent need to have 16 gigs worth of ebooks in the reader but hey, that's life. Besides if the reader CAN hold that many books it SHOULD be able to handle them. Don't get me wrong, I don't think one would ever NEED all of them (well... maybe if you got stuck on a deserted island and also had an ebook on "Charging Readers with coconuts") but the fact remains "the reader accepts 16gb cards, it should be able to handle 16 gigs".

If it gets quirky after the first 8gbs then why add the support for bigger cards when they were making them? That clearly shows that Sony didn't test it out as much as they could (granted: I don't see guys at QA thinking "let's toss every book in existence in the reader and see what happens")

Anyways, that's all... just give it up for the Beater of Seals for his script and then those who want/like it use it and those who don't... well, don't :P

Cheers

[kevin_boone]

Originally Posted by sealbeater

Who knows, lots. I can fit 4000 on the PRS-505, so what does the Kindle 2 have to do with anything? I'm just pissed it's not 6000 the way it should be. I am finding ways to achieve it. Everything in life is a compromise if you compromise yourself. I choose not to.

You're too late -- the compromise has already been made by the designers. It's up to you to decide how much of your life you want to dedicate to working around that compromise.

I suspect that the problem with large collections on the PRS is the same as the problem that many MP3 players have: ordinary end users are deemed too stupid to organize their own media in a sensible way using directories/folders, so the machine takes over the organization using metadata. The logic, presumably, is that media vendors will have supplied correct metadata (hah!) so the poor, benighted end user will be freed from any organizational burdens.

But the number of metadata items the PRS understands (basically title, author, and collection) is so limited that, even if you can get 4,000 or whatever books on it, you're never going to be able to find what you want with any efficiency.

So while I'd very much like to be able to get more books on my PRS, the lack of a decent organization system means that I probably wouldn't find it that useful in practice.

These limitations do seem a shame because they must surely be unnecessary. But I confess that they don't irritate me enough to put a lot of effort into getting around them :/

[sealbeater]

Originally Posted by kevin_boone

You're too late -- the compromise has already been made by the designers. It's up to you to decide how much of your life you want to dedicate to working around that compromise.

But the number of metadata items the PRS understands (basically title, author, and collection) is so limited that, even if you can get 4,000 or whatever books on it, you're never going to be able to find what you want with any efficiency.:/

Just to address your two points referenced here. I've donated the cost of a new PRS-505 to the openinkpot guys. I'm patient. I'm not alone and I've worked to gain headway, its very important to me and sooner or later I'll get it. That's just me and I'm very very happy with it otherwise, make no mistake, I vastly prefer it over any other device. I would just enjoy it more. I plan on taking my 16 sd card and seeing how a 700 will handle it but I have no plans on buying one.

Point two. Take it from one who has done it, it's no problem finding what I need. If I want Horseclans, I got to R, for Robert.Adams-Horseclans, if it's an encyclopedia I'm looking for, I hit the Es. I have zero, repeat zero problem with the high number of books on there. I agree, that if they had automatic Collection generation of directories, that would be very useful, but there is no issue with accessing a large number of books, I certainly don't have any. I also don't bother with metadata, the organization I do is based on file name only.

[stevejay]

Originally Posted by DrMoze

I think I'm overdoing it already with about 200 books on my Reader (internal memory), which is about a years' worth of reading. Who needs thousands of books loaded at once? Just leads to problems, from all reports.

I bought more memory and realized the same thing. If I'm not happy at @200 books, is it the reading or the collecting that's my primary concern?

With the 500 (as has been stated ad nauseum) the inability to create huge collections on the cards makes the whole pursuit a bit silly. You'll spend an hour looking for the book, and 10 minutes reading.

[HistoryWes]

Ditto here. I've got two bookcases in every room of the house, including closets... wait... only one bookcase in the bathroom. I'm looking at my Reader as a replacement. I haven't bought any pBooks since I got it, though I've been given a few as gifts. I've got just over 1100 eBooks and I suppose I can shuffle them on and off the Reader, but that's not what I want to do.

[kevin_boone]

Originally Posted by sealbeater

Take it from one who has done it, it's no problem finding what I need. If I want Horseclans, I got to R, for Robert.Adams-Horseclans, if it's an encyclopedia I'm looking for, I hit the Es. I have zero, repeat zero problem with the high number of books on there. I agree, that if they had automatic Collection generation of directories, that would be very useful, but there is no issue with accessing a large number of books, I certainly don't have any. I also don't bother with metadata, the organization I do is based on file name only.

So far as I know, you can't go to R in the author list directly. The best you can do is go to `PRQS' from the first page of the index. If you've got 4000 books, then probably the PQRS section has about 40 page of flat index. So you then got to hunt for the author you want by to-ing and fro-ing through these 40 pages, where each button press takes a second or to to update the screen.

Unless there is some clever way of doing all this, which I have overlooked, then it just strikes me as unrewarding. Not impossible, sure, but irritatingly time-wasting.

I am interested in the OpenInkpot effort, also. But simply to improve the navigation on the PRS shouldn't require replacing the operating system. Or so it seems to me.

[kevin_boone]

It occurs to me that another problem with large collections is that, although I have many thousands of documents I might want to read, only a handful are in formats that the PRS can read well. Most are in plain text or HTML. The PRS can't read HTML natively at all, I believe, and plain text is hit-and-miss. The PRS can't reflow a text document that has been formated with hard line-breaks, so reading them is often very ugly.

All this means is that I have to filter all my books before putting them on the PRS anyway. Generally I convert everything to LRF format, via HTML, including plain text, which I heuristically strip the line formatting from.

The ability to dump 4000 books on my PRS and to be sure of being able to read them is certainly something I'd welcome. But for this to work, in addition to improving the filesystem and the navigation, the PRS would have to be a whole lot better at reading things other than LRF and ePub.

Or so it seems to me.

[sealbeater]

Originally Posted by kevin_boone

It occurs to me that another problem with large collections is that, although I have many thousands of documents I might want to read, only a handful are in formats that the PRS can read well. Most are in plain text or HTML. The PRS can't read HTML natively at all, I believe, and plain text is hit-and-miss. The PRS can't reflow a text document that has been formated with hard line-breaks, so reading them is often very ugly.

All this means is that I have to filter all my books before putting them on the PRS anyway. Generally I convert everything to LRF format, via HTML, including plain text, which I heuristically strip the line formatting from.

The ability to dump 4000 books on my PRS and to be sure of being able to read them is certainly something I'd welcome. But for this to work, in addition to improving the filesystem and the navigation, the PRS would have to be a whole lot better at reading things other than LRF and ePub.

Or so it seems to me.

What do you mean, plain txt is hit or miss? That's the format of choice for me. With rtf running a distant second. I do dump .html files to .txt mostly.

As for the hard line breaks, I do have scripts to deal with that, but I have found that the best way is to get .lits, explode them with clit, and then dump the .html to .txt. I preserve the formatting and it looks quite pleasant and readable to me.

I never convert to LRF, I think LRF looks ugly compared to plain txt, and I don't feel the need to convert my vast collection into a format that can't be read natively or easily by other devices.

Please believe me when I say that I have no problem navigating my collection. Anyone who says otherwise, I challenge them to say that they've done it and had a problem. Anything else is just fear mongering.

[sealbeater]

Originally Posted by kevin_boone

So far as I know, you can't go to R in the author list directly. The best you can do is go to `PRQS' from the first page of the index. If you've got 4000 books, then probably the PQRS section has about 40 page of flat index. So you then got to hunt for the author you want by to-ing and fro-ing through these 40 pages, where each button press takes a second or to to update the screen.

Unless there is some clever way of doing all this, which I have overlooked, then it just strikes me as unrewarding. Not impossible, sure, but irritatingly time-wasting.

I am interested in the OpenInkpot effort, also. But simply to improve the navigation on the PRS shouldn't require replacing the operating system. Or so it seems to me.

I have no navigation problems at all. One of the tricks I do is to go though my entire index and bookmark things I will conviablely want to read inthe future. Also, there is the collections "feature" which is handy but I've had trouble getting both working at the same time (another sony firmware flaw), Igorsky I think his name is, has a collections manager software, that will parse your cache.xml, note the books are the in directories, so for instance, Robert.Adams-Horseclans/ and make a collection out of it. That's a reasonable way of managing, but until I did that, I just went for what I wanted, any time spent navigating was outweighed by the joy of having whatever I wanted, and I definately have spent more time reading than browsing. Plus I bookmarked religiously so I would have waypoints thoughout.

[kevin_boone]

Originally Posted by sealbeater

What do you mean, plain txt is hit or miss? That's the format of choice for me. With rtf running a distant second. I do dump .html files to .txt mostly.

The PRS doesn't cope well with text documents that are formatted with hard line breaks -- and that's nearly all of them, so far as I can see. Unless, as you say, you have stripped the text out of some other format. Most of the Gutenberg texts, for example, are formatted for a fixed-width font display of 70-80 columns. Unless you actually install fixed-width fonts of the appropriate size on the reader (which I guess is possible), then you end up with all the line breaks in stupid places:

``It was the best of times, it
was
the worst of times. it was
the age
of foolishness, it was
the age of
wisdom''

Sometimes you can get a decent rendering by fiddling around with the font size, but very often not.

It's not unreadable, of course; but it's not (to me) a very pleasant reading experience.

If you're converting from HTML or something with a specific paragraph divider, then all you have to is strip all the line breaks and put in a line break wherever there is a line-breaking or para-breaking tag -- that's easy enough.

But my point is that, unless you already have a large collection that is already in a format that the reader can read well, you're going to have to do some sort of conversion.

Please believe me when I say that I have no problem navigating my collection. Anyone who says otherwise, I challenge them to say that they've done it and had a problem. Anything else is just fear mongering.

I don't disbelieve you -- but I do think that if you find the PRS navigation adequate with a very large collection, you're in the minority, and most likely a minority of one.

The first thing I did when I got me PRS500, three years or so ago, was dump a thousand or so plain-text ebooks on a memory card. Even if I was prepared to wait for 15 minutes for it to start up, I did find it very slow to navigate. From my reading of this forum, I would guess that my experience is typical, and yours is perhaps atypical.

Not that that's important, of course -- if it would help you to be able to stick 6000 books on a memory stick, then I'm certainly not going to say you shouldn't ask for such a feature.