I’ve had my second-generation Kindle for coming on two years now, and even though it’s been a frustrating device sometimes, (especially since Canadian Kindle owners get the short end of the stick in numerous ways compared to Americans,) I’m glad I got it overall. A few days ago I converted a few chapters that a fellow Toronto area writer sent me many months ago into Kindle format, vowing that I’d get her my feedback before the year was out. I started reading on the bus yesterday, and figured out how to make annotations as I read.
Hello, frustration, I was wondering when I’d meet you again! There was an oddly unpredictable lag when clicking the ‘Save Note’ option – anywhere from a few seconds to at least two minutes before I could turn the page – or even read from the bottom of the page, where the annotation is entered.
At first I was wondering whether this was because of the way I’d used the old Mobipocket Desktop program to convert the word file into a format that Kindle could read – it wasn’t even quite the usual .mobi format. But trying annotations in a few other books resulted in the same lag, and I found a discussion thread on an e-reader forum talking about a very similar lag on Kindle 3. Apparently, it has something to do with the ‘clippings’ file that Kindle saves annotations in, and the background indexing process.
There was a solution posted – a debug script that you could type into the search box on the Kindle home screen, which would disable indexing until the Kindle was restarted. While indexing was off, apparently annotations could be entered quickly, which seemed to be a reasonable tradeoff for not updating the search indexes – and you can restart the Kindle, let it index overnight, and then disable the indexes again.
The script given was for Kindle 3, but I decided to give it a try and see how it worked, because I couldn’t find a similar method for disabling indexes on Kindle 2.
;debugOn
No real sign yet of whether it was working or not, as expected.
~help
The Kindle churned and thought about this for several seconds before bringing me back to the home screen, instead of showing me a list of debug commands. No joy. Hmm…
This time, I searched for ‘debug mode Kindle 2’ – and found something useful! It was a page with general information on debug in Kindle 2 versus 3, with the tip that in Kindle 3, you use the ~ tilde where Kindle 2 has the ` backquote.
Aha!
`help
This provided the list of debug commands. So I continued with:
`disableIndexing ;debugOff
And tested entering a new annotation – less than a second’s lag time. I haven’t tested it under real reading conditions yet, but I’m hopeful.
The Kelworth Files 
Ah, yes my old friend Search Indexing process, we meet again!
Would that my REAL nemesis, Flash, was as easily defeated as you are! 😉
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On the Kindle version you have, you can’t just send Word files to it? I do it to mine all the time for proofreading my own work, but it’s I think the Kindle 3.
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Not as such. I can send Word files to the Amazon kindle converter email address and get them back to transfer on. I could even email them directly onto the kindle via the wireless if I were willing to pay for the privilege. (That’s one of the ways that they gouge the Canadians – Americans get the email to wireless version free I understand.)
But as strange as this might sound, I hesitate to use the email converter option for somebody else’s work, because it comes back with my email address as the author. So I’d rather use something like Calibre, except that can’t process MSword files, or Mobipocket. They’re both nearly as easy to use as the email converter.
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It makes total sense to not want to email someone else’s files if they come back with your name attached. The only way around that would be to rename the file as their name, so it’s documented that way that they own the file. But if you can’t use the kindle.free addy, it doesn’t matter anyway.
Eventually I need to learn the formatting, too, just no time for it at the present.
Good luck with it, and Merry Christmas 🙂
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To clarify, I can use the @free.kindle.com address, and now it seems to me that Americans have to pay for wireless delivery via the @kindle.com address – we just have to pay 4 times as much!
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[…] in The Kelworth Files cover subjects ranging from frustrations encountered annotating Kindle text (The mysteries of Kindle debug mode) to his A-Z Challenge spotlighting 26 Camp NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) participants […]
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