I have a work around, but it may not be practical for everyone.
As pidgeon92 says, the problem is that the Kindle is searching the entire text of all your ebooks, rather than just the title and author (or even all the metadata). It speeds this up by pre-indexing all the ebooks, but this means that about 1/3 of all the space used by ebooks is for the index files and search is still slow when you have lots of ebooks. Amazon really should have a "search titles" or "search metadata" option, which would be equivalent to what most other vendors have for search while outside a particular ebook. It turns out that the Kindle does have a title search, which it does for un-indexed ebooks. So the work around is to not have any indexed ebooks. Here is how I did this:
- Reset to Factory Defaults (menu -> settings -> menu)
- Turn off indexing
- Restore all ebooks via Calibre (or from Amazon)
After doing this, my title searches take only a few seconds, and end with "Items Not Yet Indexed (1,382)". Note that I am getting hits from the titles of those 1,382 ebooks.
The drastic part of this is the Factory Reset. This wipes all your ebooks and all your settings (e.g. last read location clippings etcetera). These may be recoverable from Amazon if you are syncing into the cloud. The reason for the Factory Reset is to get an empty (or nearly empty) \system\Search Indexes folder. I don't know if there is a way to edit the contents of the Search Indexes folder without doing a factory reset. I tried deleting everything before resorting to the reset, but I think you need to at least keep Index.db. The Factory Reset approach definitely works.
Turning off indexing does not require jailbreaking your Kindle (must be v3 firmware or above), but it gets turned on again after every restart and you have to manually turn it off again. Here is
Snowman's HOWTO
Quote:
You do not have to jailbreak in order to disable indexing. Use the (undocumented) debug option:- At the home screen, press del to get a text box. You need to do this for each command.
- Type ;debugOn then press enter [Capital O; the text-box will disappear, nothing will appear to have happened]
- Check debug status by typing ~help. This will list the debug commands.
- Enter the command ~disableIndexing [capital I] and enter
- Finally, enter ;debugOff and enter. Check by typing ~help again. If you get a list of commands, then debug is still on, otherwise your k3 will search for this string.
- Debug and disableIndexing do not persist across reboots. If you make a mistake or just get lost, simply do a reboot to get back to normal.
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You can first try the
;debugOn and
~help to confirm that the
~disableIndexing is listed before doing anything drastic to your Kindle. If you mistype a command you will get a search instead of a silent return to the home screen. Use the Sym key to get ";" and "~".
Resets are not normally needed very often, although they are needed when you update collections via Calibre.