Tips for loading a large library onto a KO2

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by mdclanahan

As a bit of an update, yes, I have the 32 GB KO2. I'm currently using less than a quarter of it. I was only trying to add one book today, and it did finally show up on the device about 15 minutes later. I guess this is normal. I was just being impatient because I'm starting a read-along today and really wanted the book.

It's entirely normal. The number of books you add has no bearing on the matter; the time taken to update the library is dependent solely upon the total number of books on the device.

[mdclanahan]

Originally Posted by stumped

Ps I did not know you could disable indexing ?

This thread gives even more details.

[mdclanahan]

Originally Posted by HarryT

It's entirely normal. The number of books you add has no bearing on the matter; the time taken to update the library is dependent solely upon the total number of books on the device.

That makes sense. Good incentive to add several books at a time.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by mdclanahan

That makes sense. Good incentive to add several books at a time.

Absolutely. As I said, now I have all the books I'm likely to want on my Kindle, I do library maintenance only about once a month, which basically involves adding the books I've bought in the last month and deleting those I've read.

[DuckieTigger]

Originally Posted by HarryT

It doesn't bother me in the slightest. I load new books and delete those I've read perhaps once a month, and have a cup of coffee or something while the library list is updating.

But while it is updating itself you can still read the old books? That wouldn't be bad at all.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by DuckieTigger

But while it is updating itself you can still read the old books? That wouldn't be bad at all.

Sure.

[gteague]

thought i'd add a data point to the mix. i decided to consolidate my entire library onto a ko2. i have 2400 books in calibre, 400 documents, and 100 i've purchased via amazon. i knew i was too impatient and too distracted to load them in batches so i just moved all 2400 books at once and we were off to the races. i connected the oasis to power and let it churn for several hours and it seemed to have stopped about 700 books in on some short book.

i deleted 5 on the screen just in case (btw, if you plug the ko2 into calibre after you're finished, you can easily see the ones you deleted and add them) and let it churn overnight. in the morning it had hung with about 400 to go and again not on a large book (i have dozens and dozens of huge books such as those delphi collections and technical and reference works) and i again deleted 5 more books and it continued on to completion right on schedule of 24 hours for 2400 books. the last dozen seemed to take forever, but 3 of those were delphi collections.

i then added the purchased books and my docs and those took about another hour or two to index and i ended up with about 2900 books although there's about 100-200 duplicates in there and kindle is useless at telling me which is which in case i wanted to delete the dupes.

but again, as you say, once the dust has cleared the ko2 is as responsive as it was when it only had 400 books on it and searches don't have much lag.

/guy

[ilovejedd]

Originally Posted by gteague

i then added the purchased books and my docs and those took about another hour or two to index and i ended up with about 2900 books although there's about 100-200 duplicates in there and kindle is useless at telling me which is which in case i wanted to delete the dupes.

Curious, how do you browse your books? That's what's preventing me from just loading everything on my Kindle. Organization sucks on stock firmware.

Even jailbroken, it's still not so good (no hierarchical collections). From older posts, it seems this was supported on earlier Kindles. Shame Amazon got rid of it in later models/firmware.

[gteague]

i use calibre on my computer to find what i want to read and then i put about 6-12 items at the top of the /home/ list by searching specifically for each title and then clicking each one once and then sorting by recent. anyone would go insane trying to do anything more than basic searches or sorts using the kindle user interface.

i tried using collections, but since calibre doesn't support them, it proved way too much trouble. plus, they throw the book counts off. i'm very ocd and try to account for every book and if you load 276 docs and some of the book are in 4 collections, the count will say 280. i know, first world problems, but i'm that anal.

/guy

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by ilovejedd

Curious, how do you browse your books? That's what's preventing me from just loading everything on my Kindle. Organization sucks on stock firmware.

Even jailbroken, it's still not so good (no hierarchical collections). From older posts, it seems this was supported on earlier Kindles. Shame Amazon got rid of it in later models/firmware.

The question was not addressed to me, but I also have well over 2000 books on my Oasis 2. I don't browse them directly, as in endlessly flipping pages on the Kindle. Instead I made a Calibre catalog of all the books on the device and put it on the Oasis as well. It's much easier and faster to browse the catalog when looking for something new to read, and I can use some custom categories in my catalog (like genre). Also I add a synopsis or some other commentary to most books in the catalog .

Granted, this method probably wouldn't work for people who want a complicated and hierarchical structure for their books. I personally don't. The most important thing for me is the ability to quickly find something interesting, or an old favorite for rereading. The catalog is great for those things.

[ilovejedd]

Originally Posted by gteague

i use calibre on my computer to find what i want to read and then i put about 6-12 items at the top of the /home/ list by searching specifically for each title and then clicking each one once and then sorting by recent. anyone would go insane trying to do anything more than basic searches or sorts using the kindle user interface.

Lol, needing to go to the PC in order to find/browse for stuff to read is a sure-fire recipe for me not using the Kindle.

That said, I recently messed around again with Calibre-PHP server (by chaley) and I finally got a layout/view that plays nicer with the PW3's experimental browser. I've been mostly using that to download books on-demand.

Originally Posted by gteague

i tried using collections, but since calibre doesn't support them, it proved way too much trouble.

Lol, I traded in a perfectly working PW3 with stock fw5.9.x just so I could get a jailbreakable PW3 for Calibre collections support. Not so bad with the trade-in promo. I think I ended up paying $30-40 out of pocket. JB situation's better than stock but still not conducive to 2,000+ books. It did get me to 700+ whereas before, most I can tolerate was ~100.

Originally Posted by gteague

plus, they throw the book counts off. i'm very ocd and try to account for every book and if you load 276 docs and some of the book are in 4 collections, the count will say 280. i know, first world problems, but i'm that anal.

Interesting. I don't believe I'm seeing this behavior on 5.8.x. If I add up collection counts, I would have 1040 docs but if I switch to Recent/Title/Author sort instead of Collections, it says 775 which sounds about right.

[ilovejedd]

Originally Posted by Sirtel

The question was not addressed to me, but I also have well over 2000 books on my Oasis 2. I don't browse them directly, as in endlessly flipping pages on the Kindle. Instead I made a Calibre catalog of all the books on the device and put it on the Oasis as well. It's much easier and faster to browse the catalog when looking for something new to read, and I can use some custom categories in my catalog (like genre). Also I add a synopsis or some other commentary to most books in the catalog .

Granted, this method probably wouldn't work for people who want a complicated and hierarchical structure for their books. I personally don't. The most important thing for me is the ability to quickly find something interesting, or an old favorite for rereading. The catalog is great for those things.

Thanks for the feedback! This is one of the things I'm considering.

I've tried it before on a small test library. However, I need to clean up metadata, experiment with create catalog settings and decide on a tag convention before I load up the entire library on the Kindle.

Iirc, you can't use multiple, separate custom columns for the tag/genre index. That's pretty important for me when browsing/searching fanfics (primarily: #fandoms, #ships, #char, #tropes). I'll probably try how create catalog handles hierarchical tags after I get my library more organized.

[HLS]

I got my new kindle paperwhite on the 7th and its still stuck indexing some 400 books I sent books to kindle via content and device page. thought it would help it load better. guess not lol

[Tarana]

Deleted

[Readirect]

I'm afraid I don't have the patience to read through this entire thread so I'm not sure if this has been mentioned before but, unless you regularly search for text within books, there's absolutely no reason that Kindle OS *has* to index at all AND you can stop it from doing so fairly easily. Here's how:

Within Windows Explorer/Mac Finder, locate the folder Search Indexes on your Kindle device while it's connected to the PC. It's hidden so you'll have to tell Windows to show hidden files. Delete it then create a blank text file with the same name (make sure it doesn't have a .txt extension).

Bada boom, bada bing ... your indexing woes are over. Your Kindle will still track the titles of your ebooks, it just won't index every word in every book. No waiting weeks for your Kindle to finish indexing, no stuck books, no battery drain.

This indexing problem has been around since the first Kindle dropped so it's likely that they'll never fix it. In case you haven't noticed, Amazon's Kindle group doesn't give a damned about users.

It's also worth noting that Kobo has no problems with indexing.