PRS-950 Help for terrible slowness/lagging problems with ebooks

[sun surfer]

I am almost at my wits end here! This thread is a last-ditch effort before I completely give up on my 950 and buy a new non-Sony device.

This may be a bit long but I'll start from the beginning to give a complete picture:

I am a big highlighter/note-taker. I eventually started noticing problems with ebooks that got too many notes; they became very slow, especially when I'd try to highlight or annotate. They could become extremely slow actually, sometimes taking over 30 seconds to a minute to respond when I tried.

I did some searching and some people seemed to have a similar problem but said when it happened to them, it would slow down their entire collection, not just one book. But my problem seemed to be on a book-by-book basis; the one with too many notes would be crazy slow while I could go into one with no notes and it'd be fine.

Some recommended buying an SD card, but I wasn't sure because since it only happened on particular books and it didn't affect them all, I wasn't sure it'd be that sort of problem.

Eventually, I found a solution, cumbersome but the best I could come up with - Once a book got slow, I'd make a second (and eventually sometimes third or fourth) copy of a book with no notes. So, for instance, I'd have "Book" with notes to page 100, then "Book 2" which at first had no notes but would have notes pages 101-200, and so on. Let me just say, for someone like me who is not tech-savvy, it was very complicated, especially since at the end there was no way to combine all the notes to keep in one copy for posterity, so my library is full of multiple copies of different books. But it worked, at least for awhile.

Recently though, something has changed on the reader; I know not what. But now, the slowness does seem to affect multiple books and not just one. Also, the slowness is affecting more than just note-taking; now the page turns are becoming terribly slow on some books as well.

There is one book in particular I'm trying to read now and it is just indescribably awful, the slowness, and may be the straw that breaks the camel's back. It's about 400 pages and I'm only on around page 150 and it's already so terribly slow I don't know what to do. It's so slow that sometimes it becomes "stuck" while trying to turn a page and eventually I try to turn it again and again and finally it gets "un-stuck" and turns multiple pages. But then I have to turn back to the right page and it gets stuck all over again. But I'll just try to turn one page and wait it out and it seems to never turn!

Do you think you have any solutions? First listen to what I've tried:

I have already made a second copy of this book with no notes on it and it's still terribly slow even without notes, so it's not that.

Then I was thinking it could be the notes on other books in my reader, so I removed most of them and just left a few so there wouldn't be too many total notes on it. Didn't work.

Then I removed every book but that one, so that it was the only book on my reader and there were no notes on my reader. Didn't work. The book is still terribly slow!

Then I thought, well, let me give that SD card a try. So I went out and bought an 8GB card, put it in, formatted it, then erased all the books off the reader, then added only this book to the SD card, so there were no books on the reader and only this one with no notes on the SD card. Didn't work. The book is still terribly slow.

I wonder if it has to do with the book itself. I don't know how epub is set up (as I said, I'm not tech-savvy), but I know most books have chapters and perhaps the reader sees each chapter separately but while reading one chapter retains the memory of the entire chapter? I say this because, this book seems to possibly be put together messily. It's a book of poetry, public domain, and I paid for it because it seemed like it'd be the best-formatted of the particular edition I wanted. There are numerous poems in it, but it's generally divided into a few sections.

I wonder if whoever made the epub made the "chapters" the sections instead of individual poems, of did something weird in setting the poems up in epub that is causing it to lag so. I say that about chapters because it was already terribly slow earlier, then I got to a different section and it all the sudden sped way up again until some pages into the new section then it slowed way down again. And unfortunately, I think the new section may be most of the book, if not the rest of it, so there may be no new "chapters" to get to, and I still have over 200 pages to go.

Regardless though, it seems an ebook can't be so terribly set up by itself to slow down a reader like this, so I have to think it's my reader, especially considering the other problems I'm having with the reader at the same time and how this problem is related. This book is incredibly bad in its slowness, but it wasn't the only one that this was happening to. It sucks too because besides this and when this is not happening, I really like the 950 and think that it's superior to most e-ink devices, but this slowness is really so unbearable that I'm not sure I can handle it anymore.

So, any final suggestions before I use a sledgehammer on the 950 and get a Kindle or something?

[speakingtohe]

Hmm..
You should forgo the sledgehammer although that may be difficult.
1. I would suggest reformatting Memory and resetting to factory default.

2. Put one book on (I would suggest downloading a free book from MR or somewhere)

3. See if that works.

4. If book works, try the problem book.

5. If the problem book doesn't work use calibre or similar to convert it to rtf or other format that will not have CSS. Convert back to epub and try that copy.

step 5 may not give you a perfect output, but it should narrow down the problem area as to whether it is the 950 or the ebook that is the issue.

Helen

[Bookworm_Girl]

I can understand your frustration. I suspect I know what book of poetry you are reading! The book that I have had the most slowdown with notes is a huge one with lots of hyperlinks and chapters etc. I suspect that formatting is an issue with your particular book as well. Also I would expect it to work better on the main memory than the SD card.

[sun surfer]

Heh, Bookworm_Girl, you probably do know what I'm reading!

Thanks so much for the help and suggestions both of you! I tried what both of you said regarding memory: reformatting, factory default, trying a new book, putting it back on main memory. None of that worked.

However, converting the epub to rtf then back to epub worked! It did mess up the formatting which sucks for poetry, but it wasn't that bad. But now it's lightning fast compared to before. Whew, disaster narrowly averted.

I suppose in this case it was the formatting or something; there were a lot of links for every poem, so maybe that's it? Or maybe the chapters thing I mentioned above?

Either way, it's great to fix it for now but I think the straw still did break the camel's back. I may be looking at buying a different reader soon. It's just ridiculous I have to jump through so many hoops and deal with such frustration to read and annotate my books!

[speakingtohe]

Doesn't hurt to have another reader. I have several and would love a 950 as well.

Just a suggestion. As the problem is with the book it seems, try converting to mobi and back again. May retain more formatting that way.

Also I would refrain from buying books from the same place you bought that one if possible.

Good for you to have gotten this far
Helen

[BaenSidhe]

If you still want to go to the effort of fixing the book and hopefully keep the formatting, you might want to download Sigil and use the check epub for errors/problems (I forget what it's really called) functionality. It will list out all the problems with an explanation.