Best way to manage collections

R o d · 03-05-2015, 06:55 PM

I'm new to the Kindle world. I have a Voyage with about 40 books and already I can see that things can get out of hand if you don't have a good system for keeping track of everything.

So far I've just created collections with various themes like mystery, non-fiction, sci-fi, etc. And then put the books into those collections.

Is there a better way to do it?

eschwartz · 03-05-2015, 08:27 PM

Well, if you could jailbreak (currently requires installing over the serial port

) then you could use Collections Manager or librariansync, both of which allow you to create collections via calibre and metadata rules.

As things stand, there aren't really any options for new devices though.

tomsem · 03-06-2015, 01:19 AM

I just have a handful of generic collections: Current Reading, To Read, Read Previously, Current Technology, Technology. It is mostly to manage my reading workflow. Without these I would have a lot of trouble figuring out what I have read vs not read. I switch devices a lot. When I get a new book it goes right into To Read on whatever device downloads it. When I start a new book I take it out of To Read and put it in Current Reading. When I'm done, it goes in Read Previously.

I typically leave the device/app in Recent order, restricted to what is on the device. Most of the time my current reads are on the first screen, so no need to drill into collections to find anything.

I don't think sorting them into genres, specific authors, series etc. would be useful at all for me. IMO, it doesn't help in finding anything either (Search by part of the title or author is much faster, and you can use voice search on recent Fires and other tablets, smartphones). For the most part, reading is reading, and I don't have time or interest in classifying my Kindle library. That's what Goodreads is for. In fact Goodreads default shelves more or less mirror the way I use collections. If I wanted to classify, I'd do it there.

One could also use calibre for a similar purpose.

I understand a lot of people here would like to organize the heck out of their libraries (especially if they've managed to collect thousands of books), and are frustrated with Kindle platform's implementation. But it works quite well for my minimal requirements.

Josieb1 · 03-06-2015, 04:13 AM

I use genres or specific authors if I have a lot of books by them, and as there are two of us with kindles each collection is prefixed by our names, and then a Read and an Unread collection for each collection. I.e

Dave WW2 Read
Dave WW2 Unread
Josie Historicals Read
Josie Historicals Unread

If you think long term about what collection names you might want it makes sense to list them in an xls sheet then sort alphabetically so you get an idea of how they will look on your Kindle. Also remember that not all collections need to be on the Kindle, our Read collections are only in the cloud as we don't keep read books on the Kindles.

HarryT · 03-06-2015, 04:50 AM

I have 1800 or so books on my Voyage and don't use collections at all. I'm really only interested in managing series, and what I use for that is a Calibre plugboard that prefixes a book's title with the series name and number, so I end up with, for example:

Miss Marple 01 - The Body in the Library

I then sort my home screen by author, and the result is that I have an alphabetical list of authors, and my books sorted in series order within each author. Because my books are sorted by author I can jump directly to any author from the home screen by typing in the initial letter(s) of the author's name.

eschwartz · 03-18-2015, 10:48 PM

That is deeply confusing... why would you want people to not jailbreak if they could?

You know, the free tools come from this very website, and they require jailbreaking?

JSWolf · 03-18-2015, 10:51 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by eschwartz

That is deeply confusing... why would you want people to not jailbreak if they could?

You know, the free tools come from this very website, and they require jailbreaking?

5 of the 6 (other than you or I) have a Kindle Voyage and cannot jailbreak.

eschwartz · 03-18-2015, 11:39 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by JSWolf

5 of the 6 (other than you or I) have a Kindle Voyage and cannot jailbreak.

Err, I am aware...

AngelDan seems to feel it is a moral choice, though -- not simply the lack of a working exploit -- that should be stopping people.

I guess because we should "only update a little, to use the free tools to organize them"... whatever that means.

Thus, I do not see what he is trying to get at.

Josieb1 · 03-19-2015, 10:19 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by eschwartz

That is deeply confusing... why would you want people to not jailbreak if they could?

You know, the free tools come from this very website, and they require jailbreaking?

I have a Voyage and cannot jailbreak but to be honest even if I had a PW i have no reason or intention to jailbreak.

nynaevelan · 03-19-2015, 11:10 AM

I have the PW2 and while the free tools and jailbreaking are useful and very helpful, I am also one of those ones who do not jailbreak because to keep up with them requires a lot of hoop jumping to stay abreast of all the updates. This is not a moral decision for me, just a "I am too lazy to keep up with it".

With that said, I manage my collections strictly through Amazon's tedious collections and Calibre's plugboards. I currently have over 5000 books in my collection which includes all my purchased books, free books as well as Overdrive borrowed books. I have over 130 collections which I use to manage them. And let me say initially managing them was a tedious job, especially when Amazon introduced Cloud Collections. When you first start out it is quite a lot of work and patience to set them up but maintaining them is hard. Calibre and it's plugboards helped me to get everything where it needed to be, and it helps to keep them maintained. I strictly use Calibre to put books on my device.

Atunah · 03-19-2015, 01:03 PM

I never jail breaked any of my kindles, or really any of my devices. I just don't want to mess with stuff I don't know enough about.

Like others I use collections through Amazon. I have some 3000 book in my account, I have to guess now since amazon with its new my account doesn't tell me the number anymore. I back up all my books into calibre where I use tags and colums and virtual libraries. That is about as far as my calibre skills go.

I do not use calibre to put my amazon books in my kindle, I use the usual system for that. Those non amazon books I use send to kindle, not calibre to send so they are in the cloud.

I have collections set to different things. Genres of course but I also have a read, reading, reading next. I have collections with the years I bought the books, one for books that are next in series, etc. I used to have over 50 collections until they pushed that cloud update to my Paperwhite 1. It made my PW almost unusable and I started to delete a bunch of collections in the hopes it would fix that update. It didn't help.

Now I have my Voyage and it handles the collections like a champ and I am starting to build up the collection size again. I am at 28 now. The Voyage finally does the collections the way they were meant to work from the beginning. I can finally do it all on one device. I used to have to fiddle with collections on my fire since the PW was so slow, it took 3 minutes to add books at a time to the collections. 3 minutes each book that is.

I have no clue what a plugboard is on calibre, I never seen that. But I need my collections to be done in the amazon cloud anyway so just having the sorting in calibre alone doesn't help me. I still have it all sorted there too of course. And on goodreads and booklikes and spreadsheets.....

I like organizing my books.

Now after the Voyage perfection, the only thing missing is for Amazon to let us sort and do collections on the computer in the My account section. That would be the ultimate.

eschwartz · 03-19-2015, 03:27 PM

There is a difference between "I don't feel the need to bother" and "I am warning you, do not do this under any circumstances".

Just in case a whole bunch of people are still confused about what I thought was so strange.

odamizu · 03-19-2015, 04:37 PM

Is there a way to get Collections to work on an unregistered Kindle Voyage (without jailbreaking or using Calibre)?

I think the answer is "no," but I wanted to double-check in hope that I'm wrong.

eschwartz · 03-19-2015, 06:34 PM

Nope, the only non-registered way to create collections is through circumventing the Kindle framework and writing directly to the content catalog (/var/local/cc.db houses collections) which requires being jailbroken.

OTOH, you can easily create a dummy account so what's the big deal?

Also, collections are kept after you deregister (though you cannot edit them), and deleted+refreshed when you re-register.

odamizu · 03-20-2015, 12:18 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by eschwartz

... you can easily create a dummy account so what's the big deal?

The big deal, my dear eschwartz, is apparently I am too dense to have thought of this on my own!

Thanks!

Quote:

Also, collections are kept after you deregister (though you cannot edit them) ...

By editing, do you mean you can't add, rename or delete collections -- or you can't do anything at all to them, including adding and deleting books?

All I really want is to create one "currently reading" collection and be able to add and delete to/from that.

03-05-2015, 06:55 PM	#1
R o d Member Posts: 14 Karma: 10 Join Date: Jan 2009 Device: Kindle Voyage, Nook Simple Touch	Best way to manage collections I'm new to the Kindle world. I have a Voyage with about 40 books and already I can see that things can get out of hand if you don't have a good system for keeping track of everything. So far I've just created collections with various themes like mystery, non-fiction, sci-fi, etc. And then put the books into those collections. Is there a better way to do it?

03-06-2015, 04:13 AM	#4
Josieb1 Grand Sorcerer Posts: 5,009 Karma: 18018738 Join Date: Nov 2009 Location: UK Device: Kobo Forma, Libra2, Clara 2e, Kindle PW SE & Kindle 2022	I use genres or specific authors if I have a lot of books by them, and as there are two of us with kindles each collection is prefixed by our names, and then a Read and an Unread collection for each collection. I.e Dave WW2 Read Dave WW2 Unread Josie Historicals Read Josie Historicals Unread If you think long term about what collection names you might want it makes sense to list them in an xls sheet then sort alphabetically so you get an idea of how they will look on your Kindle. Also remember that not all collections need to be on the Kindle, our Read collections are only in the cloud as we don't keep read books on the Kindles. Last edited by Josieb1; 03-06-2015 at 04:21 AM.

03-06-2015, 04:50 AM	#5
HarryT eBook Enthusiast Posts: 85,544 Karma: 93383043 Join Date: Nov 2006 Location: UK Device: Kindle Oasis 2, iPad Pro 10.5", iPhone 6	I have 1800 or so books on my Voyage and don't use collections at all. I'm really only interested in managing series, and what I use for that is a Calibre plugboard that prefixes a book's title with the series name and number, so I end up with, for example: Miss Marple 01 - The Body in the Library I then sort my home screen by author, and the result is that I have an alphabetical list of authors, and my books sorted in series order within each author. Because my books are sorted by author I can jump directly to any author from the home screen by typing in the initial letter(s) of the author's name. Last edited by HarryT; 03-06-2015 at 05:09 AM.

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03-05-2015, 08:27 PM	#2
eschwartz Ex-Helpdesk Junkie Posts: 19,422 Karma: 85397180 Join Date: Nov 2012 Location: The Beaten Path, USA, Roundworld, This Side of Infinity Device: Kindle Touch fw5.3.7 (Wifi only)	Well, if you could jailbreak (currently requires installing over the serial port ) then you could use Collections Manager or librariansync, both of which allow you to create collections via calibre and metadata rules. As things stand, there aren't really any options for new devices though.

03-06-2015, 01:19 AM	#3
tomsem Grand Sorcerer Posts: 6,475 Karma: 26425959 Join Date: Apr 2009 Location: USA Device: iPhone 15PM, Kindle Scribe, iPad mini 6, PocketBook InkPad Color 3	I just have a handful of generic collections: Current Reading, To Read, Read Previously, Current Technology, Technology. It is mostly to manage my reading workflow. Without these I would have a lot of trouble figuring out what I have read vs not read. I switch devices a lot. When I get a new book it goes right into To Read on whatever device downloads it. When I start a new book I take it out of To Read and put it in Current Reading. When I'm done, it goes in Read Previously. I typically leave the device/app in Recent order, restricted to what is on the device. Most of the time my current reads are on the first screen, so no need to drill into collections to find anything. I don't think sorting them into genres, specific authors, series etc. would be useful at all for me. IMO, it doesn't help in finding anything either (Search by part of the title or author is much faster, and you can use voice search on recent Fires and other tablets, smartphones). For the most part, reading is reading, and I don't have time or interest in classifying my Kindle library. That's what Goodreads is for. In fact Goodreads default shelves more or less mirror the way I use collections. If I wanted to classify, I'd do it there. One could also use calibre for a similar purpose. I understand a lot of people here would like to organize the heck out of their libraries (especially if they've managed to collect thousands of books), and are frustrated with Kindle platform's implementation. But it works quite well for my minimal requirements.

03-18-2015, 10:48 PM	#6
eschwartz Ex-Helpdesk Junkie Posts: 19,422 Karma: 85397180 Join Date: Nov 2012 Location: The Beaten Path, USA, Roundworld, This Side of Infinity Device: Kindle Touch fw5.3.7 (Wifi only)	That is deeply confusing... why would you want people to not jailbreak if they could? You know, the free tools come from this very website, and they require jailbreaking?

03-19-2015, 11:10 AM	#10
nynaevelan eBook Junkie Posts: 1,526 Karma: 1464018 Join Date: May 2010 Location: USA Device: Kindle Fire 2020, Kindle PW2	I have the PW2 and while the free tools and jailbreaking are useful and very helpful, I am also one of those ones who do not jailbreak because to keep up with them requires a lot of hoop jumping to stay abreast of all the updates. This is not a moral decision for me, just a "I am too lazy to keep up with it". With that said, I manage my collections strictly through Amazon's tedious collections and Calibre's plugboards. I currently have over 5000 books in my collection which includes all my purchased books, free books as well as Overdrive borrowed books. I have over 130 collections which I use to manage them. And let me say initially managing them was a tedious job, especially when Amazon introduced Cloud Collections. When you first start out it is quite a lot of work and patience to set them up but maintaining them is hard. Calibre and it's plugboards helped me to get everything where it needed to be, and it helps to keep them maintained. I strictly use Calibre to put books on my device.

03-19-2015, 01:03 PM	#11
Atunah Wizard Posts: 1,817 Karma: 23400001 Join Date: May 2012 Location: USA Device: K1/K3/BasicK Voyage/Oasis1/Oasis3	I never jail breaked any of my kindles, or really any of my devices. I just don't want to mess with stuff I don't know enough about. Like others I use collections through Amazon. I have some 3000 book in my account, I have to guess now since amazon with its new my account doesn't tell me the number anymore. I back up all my books into calibre where I use tags and colums and virtual libraries. That is about as far as my calibre skills go. I do not use calibre to put my amazon books in my kindle, I use the usual system for that. Those non amazon books I use send to kindle, not calibre to send so they are in the cloud. I have collections set to different things. Genres of course but I also have a read, reading, reading next. I have collections with the years I bought the books, one for books that are next in series, etc. I used to have over 50 collections until they pushed that cloud update to my Paperwhite 1. It made my PW almost unusable and I started to delete a bunch of collections in the hopes it would fix that update. It didn't help. Now I have my Voyage and it handles the collections like a champ and I am starting to build up the collection size again. I am at 28 now. The Voyage finally does the collections the way they were meant to work from the beginning. I can finally do it all on one device. I used to have to fiddle with collections on my fire since the PW was so slow, it took 3 minutes to add books at a time to the collections. 3 minutes each book that is. I have no clue what a plugboard is on calibre, I never seen that. But I need my collections to be done in the amazon cloud anyway so just having the sorting in calibre alone doesn't help me. I still have it all sorted there too of course. And on goodreads and booklikes and spreadsheets..... I like organizing my books. Now after the Voyage perfection, the only thing missing is for Amazon to let us sort and do collections on the computer in the My account section. That would be the ultimate.

03-19-2015, 03:27 PM	#12
eschwartz Ex-Helpdesk Junkie Posts: 19,422 Karma: 85397180 Join Date: Nov 2012 Location: The Beaten Path, USA, Roundworld, This Side of Infinity Device: Kindle Touch fw5.3.7 (Wifi only)	There is a difference between "I don't feel the need to bother" and "I am warning you, do not do this under any circumstances". Just in case a whole bunch of people are still confused about what I thought was so strange.

03-19-2015, 04:37 PM	#13
odamizu just an egg Posts: 1,586 Karma: 4300000 Join Date: Mar 2015 Device: Kindle, iOS	Is there a way to get Collections to work on an *unregistered* Kindle Voyage (without jailbreaking or using Calibre)? I think the answer is "no," but I wanted to double-check in hope that I'm wrong.

03-19-2015, 06:34 PM	#14
eschwartz Ex-Helpdesk Junkie Posts: 19,422 Karma: 85397180 Join Date: Nov 2012 Location: The Beaten Path, USA, Roundworld, This Side of Infinity Device: Kindle Touch fw5.3.7 (Wifi only)	Nope, the only non-registered way to create collections is through circumventing the Kindle framework and writing directly to the content catalog (/var/local/cc.db houses collections) which requires being jailbroken. OTOH, you can easily create a dummy account so what's the big deal? Also, collections are kept after you deregister (though you cannot edit them), and deleted+refreshed when you re-register.

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