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Kindle search function doesn't work.

Ranb

Penultimate Amazing
Ranb
Joined
Jul 25, 2003
Messages
11,313
Location
WA USA
I have a Kindle Keyboard model D00901 that I've owned for several years. I have over 1000 books on it mostly from the Gutenberg website. Recently the search function stopped working; the Kindle freezes when I attempt to search for a word in a book or search the Kindle for a certain book.

The only way to get the Kindle to respond after it freezes is to hold the power button to the right for 40 seconds, then it shuts down and restarts. The restart and sorting of books into the 100 or so collections I've placed the books into takes a few minutes.

I contacted Amazon support via their chat feature. They want me to do a factory reset which means I'll have to restore my purchased books from their website and my free books from my laptop. The problem is I don't want to spend several hours creating new collections and sorting the e-books into them again.

Any suggestions?

Ranb
 
Reading the specs on that unit, it's only got 256MB of RAM. If your book collection has gotten to the point where it no longer fits into RAM, or a least the searchable text doesn't, it will likely be swapping portions of your search and either crashing the search function or grinding to a halt as it swaps in and out of RAM. Perhaps try deleting a hundred or so books and seeing if that helps.
 
Thanks. When I was chatting with the Amazon help people it was like I was conversing with someone like me who was Googleing answers to my questions. :)

I suppose your answer means that a factory reset will be no help at all. I currently have about half the available 3GB used for my books.

I'll try deleting some books and trying the search again.

I was not able to find any specifications on RAM for the D00901. The best I could find on my Kindle was here; https://www.manualslib.com/manual/408652/Amazon-Kindle-D00901.html#manual

Perhaps you have more info for me. My reluctance to perform a factory reset is related to sorting out my 1200 books into the 100 different collections on the Kindle. If I was able to export the directory of collections with their book files onto my laptop, it would be a simple matter to just recopy it back to the Kindle with everything sorted the way I like.

Instead it seems that I'll be stuck with re-copying everything back to the documents directory of the Kindle after the factory reset then spending several hours re-sorting everything.
 
Ranb said:
Thanks. When I was chatting with the Amazon help people it was like I was conversing with someone like me who was Googleing answers to my questions. :)

I suppose your answer means that a factory reset will be no help at all. I currently have about half the available 3GB used for my books.

I'll try deleting some books and trying the search again.

I was not able to find any specifications on RAM for the D00901. The best I could find on my Kindle was here; https://www.manualslib.com/manual/408652/Amazon-Kindle-D00901.html#manual

Perhaps you have more info for me. My reluctance to perform a factory reset is related to sorting out my 1200 books into the 100 different collections on the Kindle. If I was able to export the directory of collections with their book files onto my laptop, it would be a simple matter to just recopy it back to the Kindle with everything sorted the way I like.

Instead it seems that I'll be stuck with re-copying everything back to the documents directory of the Kindle after the factory reset then spending several hours re-sorting everything.
Click to expand...

I have a similar model that I use and I dofind that performance noticeably degrades as more gets added to it, even if I still have a relatively large amount of free space. Before trying a factory reset I'd try deleting some books off it (maybe pick one collection in entirety so it'd be easy to restore if No Joy?) and see what that does for you. Less drastic and more easily reversible than a full rest.

And while this won't solve everything since you said you've got a lot of side-loaded content you might be pleased to hear that you can manage collections of your Amazon-purchased stuff via the Web. It should already be populated with your defined collections and those should be populated with your Amazon stuff. So you would only need to manually assign to collections your side loaded stuff, but again it sounds like that's the majority of what's on there unfortunately.

FWIW.
 
Here's where I found some specifics on the hardware

https://wikidevi.com/wiki/Amazon_Kindle_Keyboard_Wi-Fi_(D00901)

I'd be somewhat surprised if it does any pre-indexing for searches, so my assumption (I know, I know) is that it does a real-time search of each book's text on demand. For 1.5-ish GBs of data, that's going to have to be swapped in and out of RAM a half-dozen times, and might actually be beyond the capabilities of the search algorithm. Should the algorithm be able to search that much data without running out of pointer or address space, the speed of flash memory is still going to be a huge bottleneck when that much data has to be loaded and unloaded several times.
 
It should be possible to hook up the Kindle to a computer and access the contents – it shows up like an external drive. You can then copy/move content off the device to free up space, and put it back to restore the former state without much fuzz. That includes the protected stuff bought from amazon.
 
Ranb said:
Thanks. When I was chatting with the Amazon help people it was like I was conversing with someone like me who was Googleing answers to my questions. :)

I suppose your answer means that a factory reset will be no help at all. I currently have about half the available 3GB used for my books.

I'll try deleting some books and trying the search again.

I was not able to find any specifications on RAM for the D00901. The best I could find on my Kindle was here; https://www.manualslib.com/manual/408652/Amazon-Kindle-D00901.html#manual

Perhaps you have more info for me. My reluctance to perform a factory reset is related to sorting out my 1200 books into the 100 different collections on the Kindle. If I was able to export the directory of collections with their book files onto my laptop, it would be a simple matter to just recopy it back to the Kindle with everything sorted the way I like.
Instead it seems that I'll be stuck with re-copying everything back to the documents directory of the Kindle after the factory reset then spending several hours re-sorting everything.
Click to expand...

Have you tried Calibre?

https://calibre-ebook.com/
 
+1 for Calibre. Been using it with my Kindle for years.

Not sure it does well with collections though. Certainly on the older Kindles, the collections file was something of a dark art. You can backup to the cloud, but I have a feeling that only works with files that have been added through Amazon, rather than sideloaded. To be fair, I haven't checked recently so they may have worked on the collections integration.

There used to be a bit of software for editing the Kindle collections file, but it was never that great to be honest.

This hasn't been very helpful.
 
elgarak said:
It should be possible to hook up the Kindle to a computer and access the contents – it shows up like an external drive. You can then copy/move content off the device to free up space, and put it back to restore the former state without much fuzz. That includes the protected stuff bought from amazon.
Click to expand...
That is how I transfer books I download from Gutenberg.com to the Kindle. I'm not able to see the collection structure on the Kindle when it is connected to the laptop with the USB cable. When I copy a book to the Kindle it has to go to the "documents" folder then I have to disconnect the Kindle from the laptop and move the book to the appropriate collection.

I'll take a look at Calibre when I get home today. Thanks.
 
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The Kindle doesn't store the collections as a directory structure, because that's not how collections work.

Collections are stored in a text file, that contains a reference to the book, and the collections it is in.

I wouldn't be stunned to find out that there has been some effort to create a decent collections manager, but my Kindle Keyboard died a while back, so there's no easy way for me to check how good they are.
 
It's about six years old. MY wife wants to buy me another one. Told her I'd get a new one when this one starts on fire. :)
 
My mom has a Kindle Fire HD but I don't know if they're similar models; but my point is that in the Fire, there is an option to do an Amazon cloud backup of all your data before doing a factory reset. In fact, the official suggestion for speeding up the Fire is to do the cloud backup first then do a factory reset. Then all you have to do is restore your device to the original files/settings/etc.

Maybe this will help you to keep your files, yet not spend days doing it all manually?
 
Worm said:
The Kindle doesn't store the collections as a directory structure, because that's not how collections work.

Collections are stored in a text file, that contains a reference to the book, and the collections it is in....
Click to expand...

Hmmm. That is how I thought directory structure worked, just a file with locations in it. I've really no idea how t works. :)
 
Things are not getting better. Now it froze on a page of a book I was reading and nothing works, can't shut it down, turn the page or access the menu for a reset. Maybe plugging it in to my computer when I get home will make it do something.
 
The Kindle eventually turns off after so many minutes of inactivity. I turned it back on and was able to select the book I was reading, but it froze again before it could open the file.

After plugging the Kindle into the laptop at home I got a message saying the laptop could not recognize the device I plugged in. The Kindle then displayed a status bar, froze then restarted with another status bar slowly creeping to completion before it finally was recognized by the laptop.

I was able to eject the Kindle; then it had to re-populate the 146 collections I had set up on it just as if I had reset it by pressing the power button for forty seconds. While it was displaying all of my collections as empty, it reconnected itself to the laptop as I had kept it plugged in via the USB cable after ejecting it. I ejected the Kindle from the laptop.

Several minutes later it the little icon at the top right stopped spinning and things appeared to display properly. But it was frozen again on the home page.

After trying to turn it off I set it down, shortly thereafter the screen went blank and it appeared to reset itself again with the collections (this time 145 of them) empty. Now it is working normally.

I'm leaning towards doing a factory reset this evening. I'm learning more about this device than I ever intended to and what I'm learning is not always pleasing. :)
 
I performed the factory reset. It wiped everything of course. When I went to the User Guide it froze on the first page; so zero progress has been made.

ETA; Amazon says they can't repair it for less than the cost of a new one. Time to shop.
 
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My wife was kind enough to give me her old Kindle Keyboard; just like mine except no ads run on it. My original Kindle is still on and frozen. It doesn't get recognized by the home computer and even the power button doesn't work at all. It should go dead in a week or three then something might happen to it when I plug it back into the computer.

I installed Calibre on my laptop. It works well for sorting and changing meta-data. It will transfer files to the Kindle, but only to the main memory; I still have to sort through the files and put them into the collections I create on the new Kindle. This will take many hours.

Another bug that annoys me is if I change the author name, Calibre will not resort the book according to the new author name, it stays in it original numerical order on the list of 1300 books I have loaded into the program. The help file says I can resort, but it seems to be referring to a different version than I am using.

Amazon offered me 15% off on a new Kindle.
 
The Norseman said:
My mom has a Kindle Fire HD but I don't know if they're similar models; but my point is that in the Fire, there is an option to do an Amazon cloud backup of all your data before doing a factory reset. In fact, the official suggestion for speeding up the Fire is to do the cloud backup first then do a factory reset. Then all you have to do is restore your device to the original files/settings/etc.

Maybe this will help you to keep your files, yet not spend days doing it all manually?
Click to expand...

The Kindle Fires are completely different, they are Android Tablets with Amazon's own skin over the top and the Android Kindle app (amoung others) pre-installed. I'm typing this on one.

Ranb is talking about a dedicated eReader, eInk screen etc.
 
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