# Not indexing.



## metal134 (Sep 2, 2010)

I got my Paperwhite all set up; downloaded all my books from the Cloud and transfered all my non-Amazon books to my device from my CPU.  But except for a few books, nothing is indexing.  After I set it up, I left the Paperwhite sit while I went out.  When I got home 7 hours later, there was no progress made.  Out of 206 items on my Kindle, only 45 of them have indexed.  Had anyone else experienced this?  I'd hate to have to wipe everything off and start fresh because it took me over an hour to get my collections set just right.


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## stevene9 (Nov 9, 2008)

I did 130 books and was amazed at how quickly it indexed. Much faster than my kk. A few hours, not days.


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## metal134 (Sep 2, 2010)

It seems like, since I unplugged it from the computer, it's starting to index, albeit very slowly.  It still had 162 items unindexed.  I left it alone and went and played a game of Arkham Horror for 2 hours.  Now it's at 148 unindexed items.


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## Betsy the Quilter (Oct 27, 2008)

For future information, or for others, we generally recommend that you only download 20-30 books at a time and let them index, and then another batch.  It will run very slowly if a large batch is added at one time.

Betsy


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## stevene9 (Nov 9, 2008)

Betsy the Quilter said:


> For future information, or for others, we generally recommend that you only download 20-30 books at a time and let them index, and then another batch. It will run very slowly if a large batch is added at one time.
> 
> Betsy


That'. I dowmloaded about 30, went away for an hour, came back and did another 30. and so on. They indexedvery quickly.


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## hamerfan (Apr 24, 2011)

Okay, here goes my questions.
What does indexing do, and how can you tell if your Kindle is doing it or has done it? I just downloaded about 30 books to my new PW from Amazon. Do I leave the PW turned on? Do I leave the wi-fi turned on? 
Thanks for any help with these questions.


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## Leslie (Apr 7, 2008)

hamerfan said:


> Okay, here goes my questions.
> What does indexing do, and how can you tell if your Kindle is doing it or has done it? I just downloaded about 30 books to my new PW from Amazon. Do I leave the PW turned on? Do I leave the wi-fi turned on?
> Thanks for any help with these questions.


When books and content are indexed, you can use the search feature. You can tell if everything is indexed (or is being indexed) by doing a search. Unindexed items will show up on the bottom of the list of search results.

You don't need to leave the Wi-Fi on. The Kindle will index, even when the device is in sleep mode.

L


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## hamerfan (Apr 24, 2011)

Thank you, Leslie, for the explanations. Glad to hear it will continue indexing in sleep mode.
This is such a great site!


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## BenJ (Sep 19, 2012)

It took almost 12 hours for my pw to index about 550 books


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## kevinpars (Nov 14, 2008)

I am sure it has been posted a million times, but a quick reminder that the easiest way to check and see how your indexing is going is to do a search from the home page that will not find any hits, such as 'ertsfafsdasdf'.  The search will return 0 hits but will tell you how many books are not indexed.

I had an issue with my new paperwhite where it was not indexing books and the solution was to hook the PW to my PC and then delete all the items in the indexing folder.  That worked and the indexing started and i have not had any issues since then.


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## metal134 (Sep 2, 2010)

Well, I tried reformatting and doing just a few books at a time.  I downloaded just the first page from the cloud, 6 books.  10 minutes later, 1 book has indexed.


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## Ann in Arlington (Oct 27, 2008)

Metal -- good advice here regarding how many things you load at a time.  My practice is generally to load 'em at night and then plug it in and let it work while I sleep.  That way it doesn't cause trouble with my reading time.   Remember, the device's battery will drain faster if it's busy indexing behind the scenes.

Kevin's reminder about searching for a nonsense string is good: it'll let you know when the indexing is finished.  But fixing a kindle that's stuck indexing is even easier than he described: If you get something that says "XX books not indexed", tap that notation and it should tell you what books are not yet indexed.  If you scan the list, you will probably see one that is grayed out -- they appeared that way, at least, on the K3K and K4; all my things are indexed on my PW so I can't verify.  Anyway, the key is to go to that book and delete it and let it get on with the indexing and then reload the book that had been the problem. 

NOTE: you don't need to do this unless the indexing gets stuck.  If you're checking every couple of hours and it's always at 148, then you probably have a corrupt file, and this may work to get rid of it so it can get on with things.  If you check periodically and the number of non indexed books keeps going down, you're fine.  It's just going to take a while -- and will use battery charge.  If it appears stuck but you don't see any grayed out books -- indicating the one that's got it stuck -- then Kevin's method would work.


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## gdae23 (Apr 30, 2009)

I've so far just loaded my Amazon books, somewhat over 300 of them. I did them all at once, even though I know better! But I did that with previous new Kindles, and everything was generally indexed by the next day. With the KPW, I loaded the books Wednesday night, and it just finished indexing Saturday afternoon. It did show slow steady progress along the way, though, so it didn't look like anything was actually stuck. The very last thing to index was an anthology with the collected works of Jules Verne, a very long book. I did think it seemed to index faster at times I had it plugged in, but of course it might just have been handling shorter books at that point.


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## metal134 (Sep 2, 2010)

gdae23 said:


> The very last thing to index was an anthology with the collected works of Jules Verne, a very long book.


I have that same book, along with about 20 collected works by other authors. I suspected these were causing the indexing to drag, so I again deleted everything and started with just regular books. It's moving faster, but still incredibly slow. I think after I FINALLY get all the regular books indexed, I'll download my anthologies one by one.


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## Labrynth (Dec 31, 2009)

Trying to move all my stuff to the new K4 but it's not indexing and nothing is greyed out when I go thru the list.

Thoughts?


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## Betsy the Quilter (Oct 27, 2008)

How many books have you downloaded and how do you know it's not indexing?

Items that aren't indexed aren't grayed out--you need to do a search for a nonsense string to see what's not indexing...

Betsy


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## Labrynth (Dec 31, 2009)

It's been sitting at the same number of books not indexed for 2 days now.  But none of them are greyed out.  We're up to 75 cause i didnt' realize it until last night.  I do NOT want to delete all of them and start over.

After all these years and Amazon has still just dropped the ball on this process.


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## Betsy the Quilter (Oct 27, 2008)

Labrynth said:


> It's been sitting at the same number of books not indexed for 2 days now. But none of them are greyed out. We're up to 75 cause i didnt' realize it until last night. I do NOT want to delete all of them and start over.
> 
> After all these years and Amazon has still just dropped the ball on this process.


Labyrinth,

EDITED because I misunderstood the post initially. You're saying there are 75 books not indexed? They won't be greyed out. I've never had a book not indexed be greyed out? Unless there's some other problem with the file.

I would suggest deleting five of them, especially the earliest ones you downloaded, if you can recall. See if that breaks the logjam. If it doesn't, do another five. Try to do the ones you downloaded first if possible.

Betsy


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## Betsy the Quilter (Oct 27, 2008)

OK, I downloaded a bunch of books at once and did the search so I could watch what happened.  I'd never done this before (and had only ever had a problem with one book not indexing).  So I see there the books do grey out when the Kindle is working on indexing them, it appears.  I downloaded five books at once, and watched them, one by one, grey out.  One book greyed out and then went back to black and a different book greyed out.  Now it's just sitting there with the one book not indexed.

So, I'd suggest doing the delete method I described earlier...deleting the books are the only way to solve the problem.  I tried re-downloading the book and it still won't index.  Going to see if it indexes on my PW.

Betsy


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## Labrynth (Dec 31, 2009)

Urg *headdesk*  Will try the delete 5 thing and see how it goes.

Yep, 75 books not indexed right now and the number hasn't changed in 2 days.  None of them are greyed out so I don't know which one is hung.

I've never had an indexing issue before so I honestly never really paid attention to the list of the ones it was working on.

Heh this is why I don't update my Kindle often... I don't want to do this crap every time.


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## Betsy the Quilter (Oct 27, 2008)

Labrynth said:


> Heh this is why I don't update my Kindle often... I don't want to do this crap every time.


Can't resist--and this is why I don't keep all my books on my Kindle.   

Let us know how it goes...

Betsy


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## Labrynth (Dec 31, 2009)

Yes but you always have wifi access... I don't.

You'd think after all these years Amazon would have a better way on this.  We've been bitching about it for... well I've had a Kindle since the K2 came out... so yeah...


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## Betsy the Quilter (Oct 27, 2008)

Labrynth said:


> Yes but you always have wifi access... I don't.
> 
> You'd think after all these years Amazon would have a better way on this. We've been b*tching about it for... well I've had a Kindle since the K2 came out... so yeah...


Well, you said you hadn't had an indexing problem, and I really never have had either, so I don't think it's a major issue. It really isn't one that people post about that often here. And volume is always an issue with computer systems; at some point you're going to tax the memory resources.

Let us know if you get it resolved.

Betsy


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## Atunah (Nov 20, 2008)

I am guessing its stuck on one book and can't get past that one to get to the others. I have had that happen when I got replacements back with my kindle keyboard. I wanted my 500 books on there at the time. 
Sometimes restarting the device triggered the re-attempt of indexing, I would try that first. 
If that doesn't work, you'll probably have to take them off and start again.


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## Ann in Arlington (Oct 27, 2008)

I think there's some way to clear the cache too, which is probably stuck/full or something which is why the indexing has stopped, even though you can't identify a specific book.  Perhaps someone at mobilereads knows how to deal with that. . . . they do a lot more techie exploration of the kindle innards and brain over there.


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## Labrynth (Dec 31, 2009)

Thanks.  Will head over there tomorrow when I have some time.  With work I haven't had the chance to even look at it the last two days.  Maybe we'll get some down time today and I can deal with it.


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## Labrynth (Dec 31, 2009)

I'm starting to think I'm going to have to delete all 70+ books.  *sigh*  I've deleted about 20 of them and it's still not indexing


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## Betsy the Quilter (Oct 27, 2008)

Have you tried restarting the device?

Betsy


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## Labrynth (Dec 31, 2009)

Yeah I turned it off and back on


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## Betsy the Quilter (Oct 27, 2008)

On and off isn't the same as a restart.  Press the menu button, select Settings, press the Menu button again and select Restart.

You should get the tree screen and "Please wait a moment while your Kindle starts up."  


This clears a lot of errors.  I should have suggested it right away.

Betsy


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## Labrynth (Dec 31, 2009)

Will do that one now.  LOL Cross your fingers.

ETA:  YAY!!! We're down to 25 books indexing.  Woohoo!!

LOL it's been so long since I've had to do anything with my Kindle but read on it that I forget how to do stuff.  Old age kicking in...


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## Atunah (Nov 20, 2008)

Yay


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## Betsy the Quilter (Oct 27, 2008)

Yay, indeed!  Thanks to Atunah for suggesting the restart!

Betsy


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## Labrynth (Dec 31, 2009)

Ok, so I have a book that is hung (The only one not to index) and I have both deleted it from my kindle and restarted, yet it's still in there as trying to index.  Thoughts?

ETA: I connected it to my computer and manually deleted it, which seems to have worked.

I've never had this much trouble getting my books to a new kindle.  Yeesh.


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## Labrynth (Dec 31, 2009)

Does anyoen else with a K4 have a lot of problems indexing?  Seriously, I'm still tryign to get al my stuff to the stupid thing because it keeps hanging and requires it to be restarted.  Even if you just try to add a few at a time it's still hanging somewhere.  This is getting insanely old.


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## Betsy the Quilter (Oct 27, 2008)

We've never recommended adding more then twenty-thirty at a time; not sure how many you are adding.  I would add them before  you go to sleep in the morning, let it work overnight, plugged in, and check it in the morning.

Betsy


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## Labrynth (Dec 31, 2009)

No, this time I was adding 10 or so at a time and it was still getting hung.


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## Labrynth (Dec 31, 2009)

If anyone is interested, i seem to be having better luck sending them from amazon than looking them up from the kindle and downloading them from there.

Also easier to put in names or key words from a  real keyboard.

LOL of course I say this now and it will probably hang again shortly.


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## BruceS (Feb 7, 2009)

Labrynth said:


> If anyone is interested, i seem to be having better luck sending them from amazon than looking them up from the kindle and downloading them from there.
> 
> Also easier to put in names or key words from a real keyboard.
> 
> LOL of course I say this now and it will probably hang again shortly.


Unless I am out with only my Kindle, I always find it easier to use the amazon.com website than the kindle itself to download books.

For the most part, I mean when shopping for new books, but I still use the amazon.com website to download books to each new Kindle I purchase.


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