Quote:
Originally Posted by haertig
That would be a totally useless feature for me. Maybe if someone had a bunch of reference books on their Kindle it might be useful.
Are there many cases of people who read novels searching for a word or phrase across multiple books? I can't come up with any need to do that. Please educate me. A Kindle is a very low horsepower device (computing power). That's got to be a heckuva burden on the poor thing to do all that parsing and processing. Can you turn that feature off?
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I use the search feature within a book fairly often, although not across multiple books. I'm guessing it uses the same index although I don't really know that.
Indexing and searching aren't particularly power hungry features if they're coded well, which I suspect the Kindles are. If you put 1000 books on board it'll take a while to index and pull the battery down pretty quickly. But since an average book has about 100,000 words that's 100,000,000 words to index. It is a lot to do.
To avoid the problems associated with indexing don't put a lot of books on board at once. Putting 30 or 40 books on the Kindle won't have much affect as long as it indexes them all okay. I typically keep 20 to 50 books on my Kindles. For those who want more the answer is just add a few each day.
The searching portion probably isn't a strain if the indices are constructed well, which they probably are.
I'm talking about this as a retired programmer. I've written code for both indexing and searching many times. I was a programmer in the days when that had to be coded manually. These days most languages have well tested indexing and searching features, as do most OS's. Kindles use Linux which is among the more sophisticated and efficient of them all. My guess, and it's only that, is that it's done very efficiently.
Barry