Perhaps the intent of my comment doesn't convey well. I'm not really trying to judge the quality of this challenge. Actually, I just thought it was interesting

Perhaps the intent of my comment doesn't convey well. I'm not really trying to judge the quality of this challenge. Actually, I just thought it was interesting and was curious if my initial "obvious" solution would actually provide improvement. Ie, I was trying to ascertain if this was one of those the obvious idea is the worse idea scenarios. Obviously the best solution would be to keep updating the base instance image with new books so it could start up up to date as was suggested in another comment below. But ignoring that possibility what other options can we explore to increase performance? I just genuinely wanted to discuss the problem and find out if its nature was one that got more interesting the harder you looked at it.