■ Fast indexed text search in your Kindle MOBI/AZW ebook collection

Owning an Amazon Kindle ebook reader, my ebook collection comprises mostly MOBI and AZW documents. It always stoke me as odd that there wasn't any windows desktop search plugin that would read into these Kindle ebooks and extract the text content. So I had to write my own, and as it is Christmas, I am giving it away as a free gift for the benefit of all ebook reading community! May all your book searches be merry and fast <g>

This download is an IFilter shell extension that deals with AZW and MOBI ebooks. These formats are really compressed archives of HTML files and their image, CSS and other resources. The format is quite complex (apparently it supports notes and even databases), but luckily for me I discovered the open source libmobi project that does most of the hard labour, and I only had to wrap it in a text filter DLL. Here is the installer:

Click to download MOBI/AZW search filter (165KB, build 1.000)

Minimum requirements: windows XP or later (32 or 64 bit)

Once installed this IFilter component will let windows desktop search and shell friendly file managers like xplorer² (and Deskrule) to extract text previews and search into kindle ebooks. Note that the Amazon AZW format is proprietory and often encrypted, so many of the books you bought won't be readable outside your kindle device. But for all MOBI and AZW books found in free collections, the plugin will work fine.

For the full kindle ebook works, don't forget the old MOBI/AZW/PRC MobiHandler thumbnail plugin (which also does book author/title properties), then you can turn xplorer² into a calibre-matching ebook manager — almost!

xplorer² showing kindle ebook text preview, thumbnails and properties

Happy holidays, everyone!