Kindle Firmware Update Gone Horribly Bad! - [SOLVED]

Originally Posted by HarryT

My mileage does indeed vary . In all the years I've used Kindles (since the K3), I've never needed to do a factory reset, or had a Kindle do one of its own accord.

Consider yourself lucky then, and I hope your luck continues to be good. I had one Kindle that kept resetting itself. I cannot remember which one as I've owned so many, but I think it was the first model after the Kindle Keyboard (K3), the first model which didn't have the built in keyboard. I also had a Sony eReader that would reset often. The worst by far though was the first touchscreen Kobo model, which was a total piece of garbage IMO and reset nearly daily. I think that was due to the almost daily FW updates Kobo was releasing. They had no clue of what they were doing and would make the Kobo Touch worse with each FW update. I actually returned it a week later because it was so bad. BTW, none of my e-Ink readers were ever jailbroken. And having worked a career in the high tech industry, I have had several hardware failures with work computers and a few with my personal computers at home. To assume you will not be plagued by a failure at some point is more wishful thinking than anything. Stuff happens--be prepared for it.

I do understand the allure of having your entire library, are at least a large part of it, on a single, portable device. But honestly, how many books can I read before that device fails or gets traded in for a newer one? If I was doing a lot of research, then I would likely have a lot of documents loaded for reference, though probably on an iPad and not a snails pace Kindle. But as far as pleasure reading, the most I would ever be able read is perhaps a book a day, so if I loaded 8000 books on a device it would take me at least 22 years to read all of them. So I personally prefer to keep the number more manageable, as in a few dozen books at most. That way there is less slow down, less hassle reinstalling, and more time to actually read rather than trying to organize a vast library on a slow device that has very little organization ability. But as I said, YMMV... BTW, I choose to use a cloud library, so I can search my entire library whenever I want a different book loaded. So as long as I have WiFi or cellular connections, I pretty much have access to my entire library without having it clutter up my device.

[Atunah]

I already had to spend the time organizing all my books. That doesn't really matter if they are in the cloud or on the device I have 48 collections. All my books are in those collections, many in more than one. So that is the same no matter how many of those books are actually on the device. I just like to have a nice selection on it to pick from. Since my kindles never had the issue with having to do a total reset, I don't worry about that. If it ever happens, I deal with it then. No point in worrying about something that has never been an issue. For 9 years I haven't had an issue. So odds are in my favor on that.

300 or so books from my large catalog is a pretty nice number on my device. I often jump into books and read the about the book to see what the book was about. I am a big mood reader and I can't barely remember what the plot was, or blurb of all the books I buy. I don't want to have to download those each and every time I pick the next book to read.

I don't know if my devices would slow down if I put all my books on it. Over 3000. But with 300 or so, I have no issues. At some point that will be more like 500 as I keep adding books to it as I use a kindle as a primary reading device.

[knc1]

The indexing system has been vastly improved since the 'old days' when it gave a lot of trouble.
But even so, 3000 books might be too many.

3,000 books in 3,000,000,000 of available storage doesn't sound like: "too much" but you have to remember the 'behind the scenes actions'.
There is another user storage area that you can not see or access -
It holds a number of databases which keep track of things about each book (like notes, highlights, bookmarks, I really don't know all, but anyway, a lot of information).
And that storage area for the databases is much, much, smaller than what you can see.

There is a good chance that you would exceed the limits of that hidden storage with 3,000 books.

Stick with 300 at a time if you can, things are less likely to break with only a few hundred on the device.