Searching on the Kindle

[bob315]

Here is a converstion I'm having with Amazon:

My original question was:
========================
The Kindle User Guide says:
...
To perform a search, follow these steps:
1. If the bottom of your screen is not displaying the Search line,
press the Search key
(shown above).
2. Type in your search criteria. You can use whole words or partial
words, and no
distinction is made between lower and upper case.
...

I can't seem to get results for partial words. Searching for
"searchin" yields no results while "searching" yields many. Can I
search for part of a word?
=========================
Your response was:
==========================
Unfortunately, when searching for content in the Kindle store, you are
not able to search for part of a word. I would recommend using the
whole word for the best search results.

I hope you found this information useful. If you have any further
questions, please contact us again.

Thanks for shopping with Amazon.com
==========================

To clarify my question a bit, I was not concerned about searching the Kindle Store. I was interested for searching on my Kindle for the occurrence of (partial) words in books that I already have. Is there a way to do that?

---

I'll let you know how it turns out.

Cheers,
Bob

[Nate the great]

I just tested it, and * works as a wildcard.

It's not on the keyboard; it's under the sym menu.

[bob315]

Hmm.. can you give an example?

I entered

searchin*

in the search box and got no results on my Kindle. I changed it to

searching

and I got 22 hits on the User's Guide plus 4 other books I have.

Cheers,
Bob

[Nate the great]

No, I was wrong. I just tried turtle*, and did not get a result for Harry Turtledove.

I thought it worked before.

[bob315]

And here is the second reply from Amazon:

Greetings from Amazon.com.

Thank you for writing back to us about searching on the Kindle device.
I confirmed that currently searching for a partial word is not
available. It is very important for us to hear about your experience
using Kindle, and I have passed your feedback along to the Kindle team.

Thank you for your interest in Amazon Kindle.


Please let us know if this e-mail resolved your question:

[tsgreer]

Ok, not sure if this applies to this discussion, but I'll give it a shot.

I have 9 pages of books and samples on my Kindle. So rather than actually flipping through the pages trying to find a certain book, I can just start typing the title.

I don't use the "search" button, I just start typing the title. You can't see any text that you are typing, but if I type in the first three letters it will take me to the page of books that has a title starting with those letters.

I don't know if I can explain this well enough. I have a book called "serenity". I just start typing "s-e-r" and my screen flashes takes me to page 7 and on that page, are my "s" books, with "serenity" being the fourth one down.

This makes it really quick to get to a book of you have lots of books. Anybody care to clarify if they can do the same thing? And should this go under the "tips and tricks" section?

And was this something I missed in the manual? I can't find anything that relates to it.

[wallcraft]

Searching the Kindle does not seem to allow wildcards or regular expressions, but it does ignore case and will find plurals (an extra "s"). A good example is purchase since this appears 52 times in the User's Guide.

[Nate the great]

I just tried it, and it works with titles when you have the ebooks sorted by title. It also works with authors when you have the ebooks sorted by author. You should add this to the tips thread

Curiously enough, most of my ebooks do not show an author. This includes all my Baen ebooks.

[wallcraft]

Originally Posted by tsgreer

I have 9 pages of books and samples on my Kindle. So rather than actually flipping through the pages trying to find a certain book, I can just start typing the title.

And was this something I missed in the manual?

It is in the User Guide on page 358 (2.2 Content Manager Menu):

Sort by Title — sorts your content alphabetically by title of the item.

Tip: If you sort your Home screen by title or author, you can type a letter to jump to the first item that begins with that letter or a number to jump to a particular page of your Home listing.

It is easy to miss in the guide, and so well worth pointing out.

[wallcraft]

Originally Posted by Nate the great

Curiously enough, most of my ebooks do not show an author. This includes all my Baen ebooks.

The same thing happens with Windows MobiPocket Reader.

Baen .prc files are Palm/MobiPocket e-books - in other words PalmDoc e-books with images. These have TEXtREAd in bytes 61-68 of the file, and don't have an author listed by MobiPocket/Kindle. Books with BOOKMOBI in bytes 61-68 of the file do have an author, they might come with filename extension .prc or .mobi but the important part seems to be BOOKMOBI. I'm sure there are finer distinctions between MobiPocket files than I am making here, but I think this may be what Amazon and MobiPocket means when they say PRC vs MOBI.

There is a similar issue on the iLiad, with PRC and MOBI books showing up differently in its content lister.

Note that you can use ConvertLIT and mobigen.exe to make a MOBI version of Baen books from their LIT download. Use mobigen.exe -jpeg and it will also have larger images than the PRC version. This is why multi-format e-books are so nice - if one format fails just switch to another.

[Nate the great]

Originally Posted by wallcraft

The same thing happens with Windows MobiPocket Reader.

Baen .prc files are Palm/MobiPocket e-books - in other words PalmDoc e-books with images. These have TEXtREAd in bytes 61-68 of the file, and don't have an author listed by MobiPocket/Kindle. Books with BOOKMOBI in bytes 61-68 of the file do have an author, they might come with filename extension .prc or .mobi but the important part seems to be BOOKMOBI. I'm sure there are finer distinctions between MobiPocket files than I am making here, but I think this may be what Amazon and MobiPocket means when they say PRC vs MOBI.

There is a similar issue on the iLiad, with PRC and MOBI books showing up differently in its content lister.

Note that you can use ConvertLIT and mobigen.exe to make a MOBI version of Baen books from their LIT download. Use mobigen.exe -jpeg and it will also have larger images than the PRC version. This is why multi-format e-books are so nice - if one format fails just switch to another.

I knew about the LIT conversion. I've done a few. The ebooks I've converted are the only ones with authors listed. That's how I noticed the difference.

Thank you for the explanation. The missing authors is a serious defect. I am going to go take it up with Arnold.

[wallcraft]

Unfortunately, the Mobi/PRC Books Forum also contains only (or mostly) PRC books.

It might be worth someone generating a prc2mobi command to upgrade PRC files to MOBI. It could probably add a missing MOBI TOC (if there is an internal TOC already) as well as the author.

[Nate the great]

Originally Posted by wallcraft

Unfortunately, the Mobi/PRC Books Forum also contains only (or mostly) PRC books.

It might be worth someone generating a prc2mobi command to upgrade PRC files to MOBI. It could probably add a missing MOBI TOC (if there is an internal TOC already) as well as the author.

Darn it. If I'd known that the ebooks I was posting were all deficient in this way, I would have done the conversion with Mobi Creator.


The really odd thing is that the files I have converted from LIT also have the PRC suffix. I did not know there was a difference until today.

Thanks again.

[DaleDe]

Originally Posted by wallcraft

Unfortunately, the Mobi/PRC Books Forum also contains only (or mostly) PRC books.

It might be worth someone generating a prc2mobi command to upgrade PRC files to MOBI. It could probably add a missing MOBI TOC (if there is an internal TOC already) as well as the author.

the extension doesn't matter but th text type embedded in the document certainly matters. You can alway rename the extension.

Dale