Firmware Update Kindle Collection Manager for Windows

[brewjono]

This is the KCM thread, not the Kindleabra thread, you might need to repost your problem there.

[KRorschachZ]

Originally Posted by brewjono

This is the KCM thread, not the Kindleabra thread, you might need to repost your problem there.

opps. excuse me. okis where is post then ? new post said you ? exits other post kindleabra ?

bye, and thanks.

[allisondbl]

The short answer is that without KCM the Kindle is USELESS. I have a life. I have work. I have no interest in spending hours trying to figure tags and other crap to put books in collections.

All I and others want to do is make folder, right click, shift and move a bunch of books into a folder, hit restart and boom books in their folders. DONE.

KCM mde that work. Calibre appears to involve writing, and clicking and tags and something way too complex to organize a couple hundred books.

Amazon has BROKEN THE KINDLE WITH THEIR UPDATE having not included a simple organizer in the first place.

End of discussion. Too bad it was nice. Now Kindle goes on the junk heap as useless.

AMAZON WISE UP.

Since you can't rollback update if the original WONDERFUL maker of KCM reads this pretty pretty please help with a fixxx!!!!


Thanks

[meme]

allisondbl,

I hope that acolegate returns to update KCM for you as it sounds like just what you need. He's done a great job with the program and it helped me with my own.

If you do have hundreds of books, then it does seem like Calibre would be right for you. But I can understand if you don't want to use it and to concern yourself with tagging your books. Although similar to the effort of organizing them yourself into folders I can appreciate its not for everyone. Feel free to post in the Calibre forum if you want any help with using it.

In case you are interested, you can use the plugin referenced above to organize your books into collections without having to tag them. It does require Calibre to use the plugin, but you don't actually have to import any books into Calibre. Just install the plugin and run the Edit Collections option. You can then add/modify collection names and add/remove books directly on the Kindle. It isn't quite the same as creating collections based on folders, but its an option. I'll give some thought to creating collections from folder names in the plugin, but it might not make sense if you already have Calibre installed.

[ignis]

Does renaming a book disable page/bookmark/note sync functionality via Whispernet?

[allisondbl]

Ignore this.

[pietro99]

I have just read right through this thread in anticipation of using KCM.

But I have 3.1 firmware on my K3...am I right that it is not working correctly on 3.1?

Also I have seen no mention of Jailbreak. I have JB and SS hack installed. Is this going to affect the use of KCM?

Thanks in anticipation.

[crich70]

I have found the program to be useful and I think my K3 does have 3.1 on it. It's nice to have something simple to help organize books on my Kindle.

[allisondbl]

I don't know what to say. As you can see, I have been in mourning for the death of KCM which was a brilliant program.

CRICH70 if you have the program working - as in you CAN drag and drop a book into a folder on the right or create a new collection, do a hard RESTART and HAVE THE BOOKS ACTUALLY STAY IN THE COLLECTIONS TO WHICH THEY WERE ADDED, rather than all of them just showing up on the main page, then I would ADORE knowing how you did this IF your version of Kindle is 3.1??!!!

My inability to have program work at all, and thus having to add each of hundreds of books to their collections one by one is making me a batty bitch!!

[jukin]

I have not actually tried KCM (I have a K2) but I was using the Kindle collection feature for months now. I like the idea of collections but have found that using them slows my Kindle significantly, in all aspects. Say I am reading a book and click Home, my Kindle would take anything up to 20 seconds before switching to the Home page. I did have over 1200 books on it but the slowdown was so much that I removed around half of them but the Kindle's speed showed no noticeable improvement.

I read a forum post a few days ago where the writer stated that when he deleted collections from his Kindle, his speed significantly improved. I thought "Why not?" and deleted all bar a couple of collections from my Kindle. The difference in speed was wonderful. No long waits anymore. I no longer have the convenience of collections and still have around 700 books on my Kindle but it has become a useable device again.

I don't know if KCM users had the same slowdowns but I do wonder if the current Kindles have the processing power to handle collections without the painful slowdowns I've experienced.

[meme]

Originally Posted by jukin

I have not actually tried KCM (I have a K2) but I was using the Kindle collection feature for months now. I like the idea of collections but have found that using them slows my Kindle significantly, in all aspects. Say I am reading a book and click Home, my Kindle would take anything up to 20 seconds before switching to the Home page.

At least on a K3 going to the Home screen from a book (regardless of how the home screen is sorted) takes about 3 seconds max - that's with about 600 books and 100+ collections at the moment. Maybe its a K2 issue?

[Dean Gibson]

Originally Posted by meme

At least on a K3 going to the Home screen from a book (regardless of how the home screen is sorted) takes about 3 seconds max - that's with about 600 books and 100+ collections at the moment. Maybe its a K2 issue?

Well, I have a DX/g (v2.5.8), and I tried having a couple hundred documents in a collection, and it slowed viewing that collection to a crawl. With 700 in a collection, the collection simply would not open. Rebooting with 2500 documents on the DX/g takes several minutes, if the documents are in the documents folder (or sub-folders). I've moved my 2500 document tree outside of the documents folder, and created HTML files (via software) to allow convenient indexing and access via web pages, but unfortunately the Kindle browser won't open a PDF file that is already on the device. In other words, there's no way I can find to open a PDF file that isn't stored in the documents folder (or sub-folders). Argghh ...

I also have a Nook Color, and it handles perfectly and quickly the 30,000 PDF files I have on it, via those same HTML pages.

I've also created a simple script to generate the collections.json file on Linux:

#!/bin/sh
# -- sql/Kindle --

function collectionName {
#        collectionName  jsonFilename  collectionName
    if [[ ! -s $1 ]]    ; then
        echo            > $1     '{'
    else
        /bin/date       >>$1    +'  ""],"lastAccess":%s000},'
    fi
    echo                >>$1     "  \"$2@en-US\":{\"items\":["
}

function collectionFile {
#        collectionFile  jsonFilename  relativeFilePath
    echo -n             "/mnt/us/documents/$2"  \
    | /usr/bin/sha1sum  -               \
    | /bin/sed -r       >>$1    's:^([[:xdigit:]]{40})  -$:    "*\1",:'
}

function collectionEnd {
#        collectionEnd  jsonFilename
    /bin/date           >>$1    +'  ""],"lastAccess":%s000}}'
}

Example usage:

collectionName  collection.json   'My sci-fi collection'
collectionFile  collection.json   'myDnlds/sciFi/scifi_filename1.pdf'
collectionFile  collection.json   'myDnlds/sciFi/scifi_filename2.pdf'
collectionName  collection.json   'My horror collection'
collectionFile  collection.json   'myDnlds/horror/horror_filename1.pdf'
collectionFile  collection.json   'myDnlds/horror/horror_filename2.pdf'
collectionEnd   collection.json

[meme]

There are certainly limitations to what the Kindle can do (subcollections anyone?). It'd be nice to have the Kindle handle local document links - then you could create any kind of linked catalog that you want.

Testing with more books per collection shows there is definitely a slowdown, even on the K3.

With 600 books, 20 collections, 10 of which contain 600 books each, it takes up to 10 seconds to settle after disconnecting from usb, 5-6 seconds to open a collection of 700 books, 5-10 seconds to go from inside a book to the home screen. Without the 10 large collections its more like a second or two.

These times don't seem to be as bad as the DX so maybe in v3.1 they improved things a little bit.

[crich70]

I noticed you didn't mention clicking on the "commit changes to Kindle" button which is just to the left of the "Eject Kindle and close" button. Have you been clicking on that button before closing the program and disconnecting? If not, that might be your problem right there. If the program doesn't know to 'save' the changes you've made then the kindle might just reset itself to what it was before you opened KCM. Like you had something stored in Ram on your computer and then you rebooted it. Anything in Ram would be erased. And yes my version of the Kindle OS is in fact 3.1 according to the settings.

Originally Posted by allisondbl

I don't know what to say. As you can see, I have been in mourning for the death of KCM which was a brilliant program.

CRICH70 if you have the program working - as in you CAN drag and drop a book into a folder on the right or create a new collection, do a hard RESTART and HAVE THE BOOKS ACTUALLY STAY IN THE COLLECTIONS TO WHICH THEY WERE ADDED, rather than all of them just showing up on the main page, then I would ADORE knowing how you did this IF your version of Kindle is 3.1??!!!

My inability to have program work at all, and thus having to add each of hundreds of books to their collections one by one is making me a batty bitch!!

[allisondbl]

Crich70 - I have clicked that button, yes. It virtually NEVER 'frees itself' to eject properly but until update I never had a problem with this. Am tempted to try again, but honestly as I seem not to be only one with problem am terrified that if I run program and let it into kindle it will again pull every single book added after update out of folders and I will end up with an ungodly mess!