I posted this already on another thread so please pardon me reposting it here:
Quote:
Because adding a user control will inevitably lead to more support contacts. Just people not knowing what it means and emailing support costs money, let alone people turning it off and then not understanding why their text searches don't work. Maybe you don't search your text but a lot of us do. And it also might shock you to know that there are lots of people who turn to customer support first, before they look at the manual or google around for an answer. These people are expensive. Customer support costs can kill your profits.
On the flip side, indexing is pretty quick. Once your books are indexed, that's it. This is a one-time performance hit. The Kindle only indexes additions. Most people don't add tons of books at a time, either. Those of us that have established libraries of DRM-free books do, but we're in the minority. Since I've had a Kindle before, I knew about this so I waited until I was done reading for the evening before doing a big book transfer. Then I plugged it in to charge and let it go. So we're looking at a rare issue with an easy workaround.
If you look at the cost/benefit from Amazon's perspective it makes no sense for them to add this as a feature. They'd have to take the time and money to develop and test the control plus deal with all the support issues so a small handful of people won't be put out that they get some battery drain when they plunk 100 books on their device. Do you think many people going to buy another model of ebook reader because it lets you disable searching? In an ideal world, every possible feature would be offered. In the real world, we have to do the math to figure out if it makes economic sense to do it. How much does it add to the cost? Does it add enough value to justify that? Will we gain or lose customers?
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That's not to say I don't support them making it more efficient. Say, only indexing when idle or only indexing when charging.