Help for prospective DX Purchaser

[adrian1944]

Could experienced DX users help me with their experiences of the DX with a large number of items loaded on the device say 500 to 1000 or more. Can one find things?
The diagrams in the user guide I have downloaded look fine but only talk of 1 to 2 pages. With no possibility to search on tags and categories how does one get about.
I assume one can go from page to page to browse but can one jump to a specific page in the index by choice.
Similarly can one get all ones bookmarks up at once on a page if one has been reading several items.
Above all does this number of books impede performance to any extent.


Regards to all and thanks for any help


adrian

[t-town]

Yes, you type a number and then clikc the 5 way button to go to any page you want. Secondly, you can search book titles and metadata.

[Kindle Addict]

There's an existing thread about an experiment I ran, where I tried to put 10,000 books on a Kindle2 - the results would be identical on a DX.

To summarize, the Kindles are not optimized for indexing and searching on large volumes of data (yet). I loaded 5,000 documents and rendered the device pretty much useless. As a follow-up, I would like to try and load a large number of PDFs, since PDFs are not indexed. I would assume that the Kindle will operate fine, but without the ability to search across the PDFs.

As for the find functions, there is another thread regarding the Kindle's ability to search.

Hope these help - feel free to post any follow-ups.

[luvshihtzu]

I have 513 books on my Kindle DX and finding anything is not a problem. I normally do a search with title or authors name at the bottom of the home page. If I want to go to a certain page, I just type in the page number and click the five way button.
As for bookmarks, I very seldom use them on my Kindle as it is good about keeping my last page read and I am the only one using it for reading. I share my Sony 505 with my husband for Overdrive Library books and on it we both use bookmarks frequently.

[angelad]

I have a few hundred titles, and usually can find what I need within a minute by doing a title or author search, but I'm not going to downplay the fact that the addition of folder creation and storage would help immensily with the usefulness of all Kindle units.

[luvshihtzu]

Kindle Addict,
From everything I have read on Kindle Boards, owners and Kindle Customer Service are advising Kindle owners to install small batches of 50 or less documents or books at a time to their Kindles. Also to do it over days rather than all at one time. Because of the indexing involved, too many done at a time will lock up your Kindle and make it unusable.
This is how I understand it.

[eboyhan]

There is a thread somewhere about how to tag docs to give them a folder like capability (folders are a feature promised by amazon for an update sometime in 2010). You can also use Calibre to keep your docs organized in a DB on a PC and only move active docs to your KDX. Personally, if I buy book from amazon, i read it then push it back to amazon's archive, for all other docs I keep them in a known locn on a PC (currently I'm using the "My Kindle Content" folder that is created in My Documents when you install Kindle for PC (a good thing to do in any case)). I try to keep my home page on KDX to under 3 pages. Kdx does give you ability to only look at books, personal docs, or periodicals sorted by date, title, or author on the home page. I currently have about 250 docs in play in my KDX environment of which I tend to only keep 50 or so on the KDX at any one time. It's not perfect, but works for me, and it will get better via amazon firmware updates in 2010. Also an app store is coming, but that's a bit further out, and details are sketchy at the moment. All the kindle wannabees out there will keep amazon crankin away on enhancements. BTW i'm a windows kinda guy -- so all my suggestions are windows centric -- most of the stuff can be done similarly on a mac. Also, I haven't noticed any slowness or lockups of the kind others have mentioned here -- i'm a happy camper.