I noticed that Journey to the West got slower and slower to read in Adobe Digital Editions. I found out why, and fixed it. Here are the download links again:

Download:

Journey to the West Downloads
License: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5
Attribution: Based from work copyrighted 2005 by Silk Pagoda (also CC Attribution Non-Commercial 2.5 Licensed).

The reason Adobe Digtial Editions was slow on the ePub version is based on the structure of ePub versus the structure of Mobipocket.

Say that all of my book’s content is in one HTML file. When I stick that into ePub, it’s still just one HTML file. Adobe Digital Editions—and really, just about any ePub reader—unzips and puts the entire file into memory.

That’s fine if the file is, say, the size of a 50 page story. But for a story that’s over 1200 pages long, that method is going to run into problems.

Solution: break up the huge HTML file into 100 much smaller files—one for each chapter.

Now as you go through the book, Adobe Digital Editions will only have perhaps a few small chapters in memory—the ones immediately before and after your position in the overall book. ((Or Adobe Digital Editions is dumber than I think it is, and only has the current chapter in memory. Still, it’s better than having all 100 loaded.)) This speeds everything up considerably. And thus you can read as quickly at Chapter 1 as you can at Chapter 100.

Why didn’t this problem affect the Mobipocket version? Because the mobigen compiler automatically does what I had to do for the ePub—it automatically broke up the longer book into 100 separate files ((100 separate records in its internals, which is actually a Palm database.)), and thus the reader never had more than a few chapters loaded at a time.

And this is where I say Computer Science! and drop off for a good night’s rest.