[tomsem]

It sounds like the index file (at least) is corrupt, and as you are not getting unindexed books message, it seems Kindle thinks there is nothing to index.

Off hand, I don't remember if the index file is something you can delete so that Kindle will re-create it (short of jail break). And even if you could do it, it might not be for the best, as the issue may involve corrupt ebook files that cause indexing to fail to complete (this condition is unfortunately 'silent', one would really prefer an error message, Amazon, after all these years!). Reset might be the surest recovery.

What happens with newly downloaded or side-loaded books? do they become searchable?

If you reset, you might make a copy of /documents folder to make it a little more convenient to restore the content. And with 1700 books it could take awhile to re-index. I've never faced this situation myself, but others recommend loading smaller batches (less than 100?), waiting for indexing to finish, then doing another batch, etc. I'm not sure if it saves time overall, but at least you can more easily isolate issues with corrupt ebook files.

You can check progress by searching for '.' (period) or some other punctuation character.

The PW (11th gen) is significantly faster than the previous one, USB-C transfer is faster, 5GHz WiFi download is faster, so you might well use this crisis as justification for getting one. The display is much better too.