Mini kobo mini with 4993 WORKS -YIPPEEEEE.HOW I DID IT

[roycymru]

Can someone please explain to me why anyone would want to put any more than a few books on any e-book reader at a time. Aren't you just better off using something like calibre to manage your books and just putting them on as and when you require. Even going away oh holiday for a couple of weeks I can't see the point of having more than 10, maximum. How many books can anyone read at one time?

[GeoffR]

Originally Posted by roycymru

Can someone please explain to me why anyone would want to put any more than a few books on any e-book reader at a time. Aren't you just better off using something like calibre to manage your books and just putting them on as and when you require. Even going away oh holiday for a couple of weeks I can't see the point of having more than 10, maximum. How many books can anyone read at one time?

Its not the number of books that I can read while on holiday that is important, it is the number that I can choose from when on holiday. If I only take 10 books, I can guarantee the book I want to read will be one of the ones I left at home. Even if I have 500 unread books and take 499 of them, chances are the one I left behind will be the one I want to read. The only solution is to take every book I own with me.

[booklover6]

Originally Posted by GeoffR

Its not the number of books that I can read while on holiday that is important, it is the number that I can choose from when on holiday. If I only take 10 books, I can guarantee the book I want to read will be one of the ones I left at home. Even if I have 500 unread books and take 499 of them, chances are the one I left behind will be the one I want to read. The only solution is to take every book I own with me.

Yes, it's all about choices. While I might be content with 30 to choose from, I would rather have 300-500, so that I have a lot to choose from. When I went on vacation a couple years ago, I took a suitcase full of books for a 4 day trip. (Plus an ereader) This year I am only reading ebooks but I will have plenty to choose from.

[samhy]

Originally Posted by roycymru

Can someone please explain to me why anyone would want to put any more than a few books on any e-book reader at a time. Aren't you just better off using something like calibre to manage your books and just putting them on as and when you require. Even going away oh holiday for a couple of weeks I can't see the point of having more than 10, maximum. How many books can anyone read at one time?

I'm with you here since I usually have 15 books at the most on my ereader, but (after reading many topics regarding that question) I understand why other people do differently. I don't like jumping from one book to another and taking some time to decide what I do want to read makes it sort of special I have chosen that book at that time, I didn't just stumbled on it.
This is the same with my audio player. I like to miss a song to discover it again. The memory is only 4G, can you believe it? I'm beyond helpless

[speakingtohe]

Originally Posted by roycymru

Can someone please explain to me why anyone would want to put any more than a few books on any e-book reader at a time. Aren't you just better off using something like calibre to manage your books and just putting them on as and when you require. Even going away oh holiday for a couple of weeks I can't see the point of having more than 10, maximum. How many books can anyone read at one time?

Smetimes (usually) I read more than one.

But mainly I read in bed, before sleeping or napping. It calms me

I have very different wants at different times. I do not want to get out of bed and look up books in calibre or go unline and download them I just want to find a book in my reader that I am in the mood to read.

I will often open a book and decide it isn't grabbing me and switch.

Having ten books only on my ereader is like having ten books only in my house and if I want another going out to buy one.

I know everyone is not like this and that is fine with me. But even assuming I really really like all the books on my reader, well it will take me about 7 days to read 10 books, and then I have to add more and delete those ones. Not a big deal, but it is much more convenient to have a few more already loaded for me. It is a comfort level kind of thing to have my favorite authors and some as yet unread authors and a few dozen anthologies and short stories at my fingertips for when I am feeling finicky. If I only wanted 10 books handy, I could just put them on the nightstand

Helen

[vugtitan]

Originally Posted by speakingtohe

But my Aura is advertised for 32,000 I think or was when I bought it and slows noticebaly at just over 500 and is close to a minute opening shelves with just over 2000. Putting a largish shelf of 93 books on it added another 30 seconds approximately.

On the mini I had 548 books I think and had made one shelf for all books, and several largish collections for genre. time was IIRC around 45 seconds to open shelves. removing all books shelf made it about 28 seconds and removing genre collections made it about 22 seconds. The reason I had the all books collection was because occassionally I could convince it to sort by latest read instead of latest added I even tried using all kepubs with the kepub driver and it was thw same so I quickly removed most them as I do not like the chapter numbers. I left the 93 book collection as kepubs in the hopes that I would become less irrataed by them, but only finding it more irritating as I read them and they are pretty short books. I guess I want more of the real book experience which has actual page numbers at the bottom of each page.

These numbers were pretty consistant when I put the shelves back and removed them again.

My Sony has 4000+ ebooks on it and takes about 5 seconds to open collections even with a collection with all of the books in it.

I am certainly not going to put rtfs etc on in the interest of anything but it is interesting to hear about.

Oh well it gives me something to experiment with when I am a tad bored.

Helen

hi

i just side loaded mobi books and epub books via usb.as the number of books increased the kobo mini became slower and prone to freezing on search in the library.
you could read an individual book ok but on searching on the library it would tend to freeze.it became sluggish.

you said you have 3300 books? does it not make it slow or freeze.do your books have covers?


how did you load the books.were they all thru calibe?

[Ladyrixx]

Bearing in mind that I'm one of the people that opened up her mini and did a DD onto a 16gb card...

I have about 1,500 or so files on my mini. This includes things like manga (including something dumb like 800 chapters of Detective Conan), every Doctor Who book ever, and other entire series.

I've very rarely had mine freeze. I know if I want to open my shelves, or search for a book I should start it thinking and check my e-mail on my phone or something, but it will get there.

The best trick (since it seems to make _every series_ into it's own shelf, is to make a shelf in Calibre called _Current Reads, and then I can stick the current 10-15 books I'm working on in.

When I finish one of those, I'll delete it, and add the next book in the series to that folder.

Personally, I think the shelf system is clunkier than the simple file structure my old EZ Reader had, but there aren't a whole lot of 5" readers out there. (Also, I like the cute sleep/off/welcome screens that it has. I'm a sucker for cute.)

[booklover6]

Originally Posted by Ladyrixx

The best trick (since it seems to make _every series_ into it's own shelf, is to make a shelf in Calibre called _Current Reads, and then I can stick the current 10-15 books I'm working on in.

You don't have to leave it that way. You can change settings in Calibre so that it doesn't create a shelf for every series. (that would drive me nuts!)

I have a shelf called 0n Deck (using the number 0 not the letter O) so that the books I am currently reading or about to read are always in there and at the top of the shelf list.

[Uschiekid]

Originally Posted by booklover6

You don't have to leave it that way. You can change settings in Calibre so that it doesn't create a shelf for every series. (that would drive me nuts!)

I have a shelf called 0n Deck (using the number 0 not the letter O) so that the books I am currently reading or about to read are always in there and at the top of the shelf list.

I have *Favourites* and *Library* as my first two shelves, *Favourites* being the ones I'm working on (and ones I'd like to read soon...or next ones in a series) and *Library* being any books I have out from the library at the moment...I like to have the library books separate because it reminds me I have books I have to finish by a certain date.

[Uschiekid]

Originally Posted by Ladyrixx

The best trick (since it seems to make _every series_ into it's own shelf, is to make a shelf in Calibre called _Current Reads, and then I can stick the current 10-15 books I'm working on in.

Go into the kobo plugin and remove "series" from the list of columns that create bookshelves. You probably have something like "#myshelves, series" in the list. Just take out series.

[vugtitan]

Originally Posted by GeoffR

Its not the number of books that I can read while on holiday that is important, it is the number that I can choose from when on holiday. If I only take 10 books, I can guarantee the book I want to read will be one of the ones I left at home. Even if I have 500 unread books and take 499 of them, chances are the one I left behind will be the one I want to read. The only solution is to take every book I own with me.

question is does the kobo freeze with say 5000 books or not.

some people say it does and some people say it don't.

also loading via calibre make any difference?

[speakingtohe]

Originally Posted by vugtitan

hi

i just side loaded mobi books and epub books via usb.as the number of books increased the kobo mini became slower and prone to freezing on search in the library.
you could read an individual book ok but on searching on the library it would tend to freeze.it became sluggish.

you said you have 3300 books? does it not make it slow or freeze.do your books have covers?


how did you load the books.were they all thru calibe?

I side loaded with calibre and I said I think that I have over 2000 on the Aura

I lent my Auara to someone vision impaired for a day or two, so I cannot be precise.

I believe I have 500+ collections and one largish collection of 93 books.

It does not freeze although sometimes I think it has

It takes about 1.5 minutes to open the shelf list. Sometimes the shelf icon does not highlight so I press it again and it will open a shelf and I have to start over by pressing the back button and waiting another 1.5 minutes.

I only have epubs on it.

More books makes it slower, but number of collections and size of collections has larger impact in my experience.

On my mini I have 168 shelves and 811 books and it takes 11 seconds to open the shelf list. This does not seem bad.

When I got it I had 548 book and I am not sure how many shelves. One shelf had 548 books which I put on because I wanted to actually sort by last read, which it would do occassionally

The other three largish shelves were by genre and I think one of them was around 200 books.

The time to open shelves was IIRC close to a minute. Removing the largest shelf cut the time in half, and removing the genre shelves reduced it further.

I find 11 seconds pretty tolerable, but am unable to understand why more shelves would make it 5-20 times slower when it doesn't on other readers with slower processors, and firmware 4 years old. (20 tims lower on Aura HD than old Sony 600 with 4000 books.

On the Aura I put the same books first on an SD card (I tried 3) and then in main memory with no noticeble difference in time to open shelves.

I had covers only in the books and then loaded by the driver. No noticable difference.

I plan to fill up my 32G SD card one of these days on the Aura (renaming them using plugboards probably to get that many books) but I imagine it will become unusable long before it is full even without shelves, but I am curious. If it still works I will add some shelves

I don't search much so can't comment on freezing during searching.

Helen

[GeoffR]

Originally Posted by vugtitan

question is does the kobo freeze with say 5000 books or not.

some people say it does and some people say it don't.

also loading via calibre make any difference?

Some things that can contribute to a slowdown/freezing are the number of shelves, database or filesystem corruption, and bad books. All of these could be bigger problems or more likely to happen with a large number of books.

Also I guess that if someone has 5000 books then they probably loaded them all at once without checking each one for problems, and so there is no way to find which book is causing the problem, whereas if they accumulate books over a long time and load each one by one then they might notice if one suddenly causes a slowdown.

Shelves are known to cause a slowdown, and the more books on the shelves the slower it gets. (I don't use shelves though).

Edit: Also, if someone has 5000 books then they will almost certainly have exceeded the FAT limit on the number of files in the images directory, unless they have been careful to use very short filenames (I worked out that if you keep each filename to less than 8 characters, e.g. 1234567.epub, then you can get about 5400 books before running into the limit, but most will run into problems with far fewer books than that), or have taken other steps such as modifying the database manually or using non-FAT filesystem.

[TechniSol]

I'm curious. I don't have a bazillion ebooks, so am asking those who have a pile of them on their readers. I have only around 234 titles on my Glo, with some distributed over 11 shelves. But some are a bit ponderous, the one I'm making my way through now has 4,443 pages according to the reader. Anyhow, I'm not noticing anything out of the ordinary -other than it taking a few seconds to open this huge book from the home page carrousel, but wondered what is causing the problem with larger collections.

Is it because of cover image processing? Do you see a major difference in performance when looking at the shelves view with small icons vs. the larger covers without the text? (Wrench option menu on individual shelves and the books choice in the Library)

Is it because there are in some cases several thousand entries in the database to be processed? Is it because they make sure all the cover images are rendered before displaying the first page of items on a shelf or in the Library? Perhaps code that only prepared the covers for a page or so in advance would limit the initial lag time and allow for further processing as pages were advanced. This, of course, assumes they have multi-threaded or multi-tasking capability so a background task could continue to process items while pages of shelves or the Library are advanced, or that short waits beat one really long wait?

If it's sorting the database, why don't they include index fields for their different sorts as a series of linked lists and just re-sort the index, really just insert or delete, as titles are added or deleted?

I'm just trying to get a handle on why it slows down with so many books beyond what seems proportionate for the number of books. I mean a 1GHz processor is a lot of oomph all in all.

Or is it really not the code so much as processing problems with certain books?

[Uschiekid]

Originally Posted by TechniSol

I'm curious. I don't have a bazillion ebooks, so am asking those who have a pile of them on their readers. I have only around 234 titles on my Glo, with some distributed over 11 shelves. But some are a bit ponderous, the one I'm making my way through now has 4,443 pages according to the reader. Anyhow, I'm not noticing anything out of the ordinary -other than it taking a few seconds to open this huge book from the home page carrousel, but wondered what is causing the problem with larger collections.

Is it because of cover image processing? Do you see a major difference in performance when looking at the shelves view with small icons vs. the larger covers without the text? (Wrench option menu on individual shelves and the books choice in the Library)

Is it because there are in some cases several thousand entries in the database to be processed? Is it because they make sure all the cover images are rendered before displaying the first page of items on a shelf or in the Library? Perhaps code that only prepared the covers for a page or so in advance would limit the initial lag time and allow for further processing as pages were advanced. This, of course, assumes they have multi-threaded or multi-tasking capability so a background task could continue to process items while pages of shelves or the Library are advanced, or that short waits beat one really long wait?

If it's sorting the database, why don't they include index fields for their different sorts as a series of linked lists and just re-sort the index, really just insert or delete, as titles are added or deleted?

I'm just trying to get a handle on why it slows down with so many books beyond what seems proportionate for the number of books. I mean a 1GHz processor is a lot of oomph all in all.

Or is it really not the code so much as processing problems with certain books?

I can't speak as one who has thousands on their reader, BUT the thing that DID make a difference for me, was a) putting all my epubs on an external SD card and b) using calibre to send covers right from a blank slate.

I never sent over hundreds to be processed by the glo at once, but every batch (between 5 and 20 epubs i would guess) i checked that the covers were correctly created...after doing that there is no sign of the covers being created when i open books or shelves and there is no longer any lag. I only have about 400 or so books and 3 pages of shelves, but at least one of my shelves has 100 books on it. I only use the shelves as really general divisions...like british classics, contemporary american lit., etc. I use series info, but don't create shelves for series, and for me that is enough organisation.

The reason I bring my case up though, is that I orginally didn't have "create covers" in calibre checked. then i did. so only some were sent to the glo before the kobo had a chance to create them. but the covers that the kobo supposedly had already created, would seem to recreate every time. on the main memory. and lag EVERYTHING.

I felt like what might have made the big difference for my case was that when i took all my epubs/pdfs off my main memory and put them on a storage card, that the storage card started fresh and only had book related info on it. i really don't know if this is the reason, but when i looked at all the images saved on the internal memory...well there are something like 5000. it's like every time i had recommended books come at me, those were saved, everytime i searched in the kobo store, those were saved, etc, etc, etc. insane. but some other images that might be important...so i haven't just gone and deleted them all.
whereas my external drive has exactly 3x#of books on card.

maybe this is totally unrelated, and by the time I get up to 2000 books mine will be crap as well, but since i saw such an improvement doing it this way, when in the past the lag was quite bad, i felt there just might be something that would spark an idea in someone's brain!