Hands on Kindle Paperwhite 4

[ilovejedd]

Originally Posted by covingtoncat73

Oh, gotcha. Thanks, Harry. It seems to search well. I give it another test run by looking up my next book.

Note, the search index is for searching inside the books' contents. For example, if you search for "mitochondria" in the home/library view, you can find all the books in your library containing the word mitochondria.

I expect author/title is stored in a separate database and you can search by those attributes regardless of whether indexing has finished or not.

[covingtoncat73]

Originally Posted by ilovejedd

Note, the search index is for searching inside the books' contents. For example, if you search for "mitochondria" in the home/library view, you can find all the books in your library containing the word mitochondria.

I expect author/title is stored in a separate database and you can search by those attributes regardless of whether indexing has finished or not.

Gotcha. Thanks, ilovejedd.

[haertig]

Originally Posted by ilovejedd

Note, the search index is for searching inside the books' contents. For example, if you search for "mitochondria" in the home/library view, you can find all the books in your library containing the word mitochondria.

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?

[rcentros]

Originally Posted by haertig

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?

I can't speak specifically for a reason to use this feature (except, as you mentioned) for research (or maybe a series of novels). But once the books have been indexed there isn't much involved in "processing." Unless I'm missing something here, the index is stored as a database and "searches" are almost instantaneous at that point. In Linux they have an "updatedb" command, which indexes all the files on the system. Then when you need to find something, you simply type "locate xxxx" and the command accesses a database, it doesn't do another search. If you add or delete a file between "updatedb" and issuing the "locate" command, it will still work off the old database. I'm guessing the Kindle does something similar.

[jhowell]

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.

I believe that the same index is also used when searching the book you are currently reading. That is useful for finding the first mention of a character in a novel, etc.

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by jhowell

I believe that the same index is also used when searching the book you are currently reading. That is useful for finding the first mention of a character in a novel, etc.

It's also useful for series books. For example, I often read long fantasy and science fiction series. Sometimes when a character or a place is mentioned in a later book, I don't remember exactly what was said about it in earlier books, and in which book it was said. Global search across the entire library will come in handy then, and I've used it many times.

[Paperbackstash]

Originally Posted by haertig

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?

You'd be surprised. I belong to several Reading Challenge Groups on Goodreads, and we have to find words or phrases used in books for monthly challenges, so this feature comes in handy.

[ilovejedd]

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?

I use it quite often. I've read thousands fanfics and I'd often remember a phrase from a story but I can't remember the title or author. I would normally run full text search (regex) using Notepad++ on the PC. I find it very convenient to have similar functionality on the Kindle.

Once the book is indexed, searches are super quick. Can't search a book if it's not indexed though. Understandable given the limited processing power.

Originally Posted by haertig

Are there many cases of people who read novels searching for a word or phrase across multiple books?

I love authors like Wodehouse, Douglas Adams, and Pratchett as (among other things) sources of les mots justes. But remembering exactly WHICH of their works has the specific quote I want to use at any given time is often beyond the increasingly limited processing power of my wetware NPU. So having a machine index them for me is very heelful indeed

[tomsem]

Originally Posted by stuartjmz

I love authors like Wodehouse, Douglas Adams, and Pratchett as (among other things) sources of les mots justes. But remembering exactly WHICH of their works has the specific quote I want to use at any given time is often beyond the increasingly limited processing power of my wetware NPU. So having a machine index them for me is very heelful indeed

And it is a feature that the Kindle (mobile/desktop) apps do not have.

I suppose this is one argument for 32GB Kindle: most people could download their entire Kindle library and then search through all of it.

But probably more usable or practical would be to index all the content in Kindle Store, then have a web search that you could restrict to just the content that is in your library and find it that way (sort of like books.google.com for your Kindle library). And on-device search could add in those results as well (if device is online).

[patrickt]

Originally Posted by barryem

I played with this a bit yesterday and I liked it. I'm a page swiper, not a tapper, and with my Voyage I was always accidentally turning a page because I was holding it wrong. That hardly ever happened with the Paperwhite 3. So this feature was worth trying.

The device is still new. I just got it yesterday so I'm playing a lot with the settings, looking for differences, etc. and that feature made doing that very difficult. If I wanted to change the font or something I had to tap the power button to put it to sleep, again to wake it up and then play with the setting.

I tried it again last night while reading, having pretty much decided how I like the settings, and all was well. It worked just fine for me. I now feel sorry for you poor page tappers. This feature is just for us swipers.

Actually so far there's something about the shape or size of the PW4 that causes me to accidentally turn pages less often. That may change Monday when my cover gets here but now I have the touch screen disabler to deal with that.

Barry

I would feel sorry for you "swipers" but I suppose the exercise does you good. I won't have a PW4 till my sister brings me mine when she visits Mexico. Am I correct the "disable touchscreen" turns off tapping but not swiping?

[patrickt]

Originally Posted by Paperbackstash

You'd be surprised. I belong to several Reading Challenge Groups on Goodreads, and we have to find words or phrases used in books for monthly challenges, so this feature comes in handy.

Isn't that considered cheating?

[haertig]

I hadn't thought of the use to look up a characters name/introduction that I had forgotten. I might have to start doing that. What I've been doing for this need, is the very first time a characters name is mentioned, I highlight it. Then when that character pops up again later and I've forgotten who they are, I manually search through my highlights. Is it the X-Ray feature that also does this? I don't use X-Ray much, since most of my books are side-loaded from Calibre and I don't think X-Ray works with those. I might be doing something wrong though. I'll have to try the search feature for character references now. I just never thought to try it.

[tomsem]

Originally Posted by patrickt

I would feel sorry for you "swipers" but I suppose the exercise does you good. I won't have a PW4 till my sister brings me mine when she visits Mexico. Am I correct the "disable touchscreen" turns off tapping but not swiping?

That’s correct. And to re-enable touchscreen for anything but turning pages, you need to put it to sleep and wake it up.

[j.p.s]

Originally Posted by haertig

I hadn't thought of the use to look up a characters name/introduction that I had forgotten. I might have to start doing that. What I've been doing for this need, is the very first time a characters name is mentioned, I highlight it. Then when that character pops up again later and I've forgotten who they are, I manually search through my highlights. Is it the X-Ray feature that also does this? I don't use X-Ray much, since most of my books are side-loaded from Calibre and I don't think X-Ray works with those. I might be doing something wrong though. I'll have to try the search feature for character references now. I just never thought to try it.

Yes, Xray can be used for character searches (and more). I find it very useful.

If Calibre doesn't change the size of the azw3 file, Xray should work fine, but you need to jump through a few hoops to get the Xray file.

First, you need to copy the as delivered from amazon azw3 file to a subdirectory in the documents directory on the kindle. (It's been my experience that putting the azw3 directly in the documents directory results in it getting changed to KFX after connecting to WiFi.)

Second, connect to WiFi and open the book. The kindle will then download the XRAY.entities.ASIN.asc to the book's .sdr subdirectory. Then you can copy the XRAY file to someplace safe, remove the book from the device, copy the book with Calibre, open it, close it, and put the XRAY file in the book's .sdr subdirectory.

If the azw3 from Calibre is larger than the one direct from amazon, the metadata has been changed, but I am pretty sure the XRAY file can still be salvaged with a bit of SQL.

If you have configured Calibre to resize images, change style, etc, it would get much trickier, but might still be possible. I think Calibre takes specification of device model as permission to make various changes to books.

At least for me, simply using Calibre to run the plugin from Alf and friends does not require any changes to the Xray file. (I always directly copy the Alf'd azw3 to my kindle so I have no idea what is required to prevent Calibre from mucking with the azw3 during the copy.)