Why are some "Personal Books" not indexed for searching?

There may have been images in the document, but the notes, stories, writing is all text.

(I know what you mean though, I had a technical PDF with a lot of Hebrew, all the Hebrew was turned into images - I was very disappointed.)

nope. didn't work. the indexing didn't take very long.

I opened a PB in one window. then opened a basic search for all text in that PB, then entered a simple search for something I cut/pasted from the open PB. 0 results.  Doing a full rebuild now.

In this instance, it may actually help to delete the %LOCALAPPDATA%\Logos\Data\(random)\PersonalBookIndex folder entirely (then restart the application). 

If you can, save the LogosIndexer.log file so we can verify that all PBBs are indexed properly. If search still doesn't work, post the log file and the resource ID of the resource you're searching.

Finally, it's possible that there's something about that PBB that stops it being indexed properly. We'd probably need a copy of your DOCX file to build and index the PBB ourselves and see what's going on.

Thank you. that did it.

I also discovered that there is no group, or automatic tag or collection specifically pointing to them.  So I spent some time to tag each one and discovered that one of my older PB's said something about not having a license to open it. Wait, what?! I created that one again and it now shows up too (and is indexed).

Thank you for your help.

In this instance, it may actually help to delete the %LOCALAPPDATA%\Logos\Data\(random)\PersonalBookIndex folder entirely (then restart the application). 

Where do we find this file?

Are there benefits to doing this even if we do not know for sure if we have this problem?

There are actually a handful of files in that folder. That folder contains the index files for your Personal Book Builds.  When you delete the folder (after exiting L8), it should just go away.  then when you start L8 up again, it looks for, can't find, and then rebuilds them from scratch.  Depending on how many PBBs you have, how fast your computer is, and your hard drive, and how much space is available, it may take some time to rebuild the PBB index. On my computer, it took a few minutes. once it was done, it was complete.

There is no "real" danger of deleting that folder (assuming your L8 is otherwise functioning correctly). If you have PBBs, it will recreate what it needs to work.  The downside is that it may take some time to build the new index.

I am not the expert, so Faithlife folks can correct me if I am wrong here.  I believe when you add a PBB, it does an "addendum" (for a lack of a more appropriate word) index for that new book. This is how additional resources are indexed for the main L8 system.  The whole index isn't recreated every time there is a new resource. (wow, I would not be able to use my system very much if that were the case).

So, if you add new resources frequently at all, your system performance could be improved - slightly - by doing a "Rebuild Index" (and a Rebuild Personal Book Index.  It seems these are separate. I had previously assumed that when I do a full rebuild, the PBBs were included.  I was apparently incorrect.)

one of my older PB's said something about not having a license to open it. Wait, what?!

This is the expected behavior when you try to open a personal book which 1) you did not compile on the specific device used and 2) you did not manually upload the compiled file to the cloud. 

Does that describe this particular personal book? 

yeah. nope.
I use my main computer to create the PBBs, and I always upload them. I don't know what caused it, but it is all fixed now when I deleted the PBB index folder and then allowed L8 to recreate it. woohoo, so it's all good now. I recreated that specific PBB and it all works.