Example-based super-resolution (SR) methods learn the correspondences between low resolution (LR) and high-resolution (HR) image patches, where the patches are extracted from a training database. To reconstruct a single LR image into a HR one, each LR image patch is processed by the previously trained model to recover its corresponding HR patch. For this reason, they are computationally inefficient. We propose the use of a selective patch processing technique to carry out the super-resolution step more efficiently, while maintaining the output quality. In this technique, only patches of high variance are processed by the costly reconstruction steps, while the rest of the patches are processed by fast bicubic interpolation. We have applied the proposed improvement on representative example-based SR methods to super-resolve text images. The results show a significant speed up for text SR without a drop in the ocr accuracy. In order to carry out an extensive and solid performance evaluation, we also present a public database of text images for training and testing example-based SR methods.