Content How to Organize Books?

[rajendra8]

HI,
Today i am the proud owner of Kindle DX. Excellent product. I fell in love with it.
Since I am new I have a few questions.

1) I have hundreds of books. Is there any way I can organize them into categories like religion, Spiritual, Fiction etc?
2. I see that titles in the home appear in Bold. Is there a way ascii texts can be made into Bold?
Many thanks for the answers.
Raj

[Ea]

There is no way of organising books on the device itself - except you can choose to have them displayed alphabetacally per author or title, or latest opened. We are all waiting for Amazon to add tags or some other functionality to organise content.

If your books are DRM-free, you can use a library application on your computer to manage your books. A great one is calibre - and it's free, too: http://calibre-ebook.com/
In calibre you can add categories to your books, and convert them and manage the content on your Kindle as well.

[kevindorsey]

I organize them on my desktop and then transfer whatever I need into DX. Also, there is an online service, I think its goodreads? that does the same.

Hopefully, the next version of the Kindle will integrate folders.

[tomsem]

It may be too radical for most folks, but the only things I keep on my Kindle are:
1 - books I am currently reading or haven't read yet
2 - 'subscriptions' generated by calibre
3 - 'personal' documents (PDFs of electronics manuals and technical docs)
4 - references (dictionaries, feedbooks directory, gutenberg magic catalog)

These typically comprise fewer than 40 total items, and since I usually have my home page set to view Subscriptions or Books only, I have at most I have a couple of pages to navigate. I remove anything I have finished reading immediately. Amazon purchases are automatically archived, and everything else I read is free so I can always get another copy should I wish to.

I use my computer and Kindle for Mac to find new reading material and view book samples. When I finish reading something on my Kindle, I use my computer to pick another book to read and send it to Kindle. I don't buy anything until I'm ready to start reading it.

Getting the samples off my Kindle and onto my computer really uncluttered things and helps me concentrate on what I'm trying to finish reading. I have about 80 samples, and I doubt I'll wind up purchasing more than 20% of them, but these function as sort of a wish list. (I know there's a Kindle Store wish list now, but I haven't tried that yet.)

I personally have no reason to have 'hundreds of books' on Kindle. As a matter of practicality, I can only effectively read a handful of books at a time (if that <g>), and what I have on there is enough to keep me busy reading for weeks. So this system works well for me.

If I wanted to do 'research' with it, Kindle would be completely inadequate in terms of organizing and annotating materials. I think that will continue to be the case even when Amazon delivers its 'solution' for organizing, largely because its PDF support is so limited (no annotation or link support) and PDF navigation is so slow. I will occasionally restore a book I have previously read so I can look something up, but find I don't need to do this very often, so it doesn't need to stay on my Kindle cluttering things up.

[Sheikspeare]

How long's a string? How many reference books do you want on your Kindle? How many books do you want to have access to at your finger tips at any given moment?

That's why we need some sort of book management system (folders or whatever) -- according to Amazon, there should be something coming out sometime before the 'first half of 2010'. We'll see...


CORRECTION: Not 'before the first half of 2010' but anytime during the first half of 2010

[pilotbob]

Originally Posted by Sheikspeare

That's why we need some sort of book management system (folders or whatever) -- according to Amazon, there should be something coming out sometime before the 'first half of 2010'. We'll see...

Yes, I'm hoping it is folders or tags and not a single collections level a la Sony.

BOb

(That said I only keep a small amount of toread ebooks on my kindle. Perhaps I would keep more if they added more organization stuff.)

[ficbot]

When I had my Sony where the tags in Calibre became collections, I had every single TBR book on there. I miss that. My Kindle has all the space and I would use it if only there was a way to have collections for browsing.

[Sydney's Mom]

I use Calibre, decide the top couple books in each genre I would like to read, and transfer them to my kindle. As I read them, I mark them read in Calibre. When I am down to just a book in a genre, rinse and repeat. I had my kindle for about a year before I went to Calibre. It took a great deal of work to transfer all my books at that time - I would stongly recommend starting early. I use transfer via computer instead of Whispernet to get my books - they are catalogued first.

[=X=]

Originally Posted by ficbot

When I had my Sony where the tags in Calibre became collections, I had every single TBR book on there. I miss that. My Kindle has all the space and I would use it if only there was a way to have collections for browsing.

That was also how I use to use my SONY. But what I realized is that it still slowed down my SONY device and there where a lot of clutter.

I eventually changed my reading habbit and I ended reformatting my SONY device and just keeping a small set of books on the reader.

Not only did it improve speed but kept me focused as most of the books on the SONY where the ones I wanted to read and just not there for the sake of having them there.

=X=

[Ea]

Originally Posted by =X=

I eventually changed my reading habbit and I ended reformatting my SONY device and just keeping a small set of books on the reader.

Not only did it improve speed but kept me focused as most of the books on the SONY where the ones I wanted to read and just not there for the sake of having them there.

That's more or less what I'm trying to do - if I have too much to choose from I tend to start and not finish too many books. So now I try to keep as little as possible in order to focus. Though I have collection of "comfort fic" or whatever it could be called, that I want to have avaliable always. This is where it's nice to have folder support on a device.

[lilman]

Originally Posted by rajendra8

HI,
1) I have hundreds of books. Is there any way I can organize them into categories like religion, Spiritual, Fiction etc?

Unfortunately no. The closest you could get to this is including the category in the filename. For example, the beginning of every file could start with a [tag] section where you replace tag with whatever categories that file falls under. For example:[religion][spiritual]Bible.pdf

Then, when you want to find all titles that fall under the religion category, you could just do a search for [religion]. Actually, it would be better to come up with your own system and have religion be something like [R], sci-fi be [SF], and etc. to keep the filenames short. Anyway, that would work, albeit it isn't the cleanest solution.

In terms of file organization, I keep my manga pdfs organized in folders in the "pictures" folder on my DX. They won't appear any more organized on the DX home screen, but at least they are organized when I am looking at it connected to my computer.