Hi,
I put together an article on my blog
http://aproudlove.squarespace.com about some good methods to organise collections and books on your Kindle, based on a discussion that I am involved in on the Amazon forums.
The reason I am posting it here, is that I'd like to try and make this as comprehensive as I can, especially as there are a lot of new users (me included) that I think can benefit from it. So I wanted to ask on here if any of you have any other ideas or suggestions that I can add to it? I would really appreciate it.
I've included the article here below for you to see and edit as well; It's quite long though, I like to waffle
TIA for your help.
One of the advantages of the newer Kindle models is that you now have 4 GB of space on the device itself for storing books, depending on the size the files take up physically in the memory, thats around 3-4 thousand books, as you can no doubt imagine, having to scroll through page after page in order to find the book you’re looking for is not the most practical or efficient way to do it.
Sure you can move your cursor to the top of the home screen and change the way that the books are ordered, by displaying Most Recent First for example, which is great (but not always, I’ll explain why in a minute) to find something that you have just added to your device but not much else. You can sort by Author but if you’re looking for something and the authors name begins with an R, you’re going to be going through a lot of pages again. Or to return to my aforementioned explanation, just yesterday I was trying to sync a newspaper to my Kindle, I received the confirmation emails that it had been sent but I couldn’t find it on my home screen, even when I sorted by most recent, yet if I went into search and typed in the name there it was. So I did a little digging and it had been placed automatically into a collection called Periodicals, that had been placed, can you guess? Of course you can, on the last page, even when sorted by most recent.
Another way to sort things is Alphabetically, which seems to be the default sort order that the majority of people prefer, after all, most of us tend to be organised to some kind of extent and it’s always nice to be able to get to something fast but even with Alphabetical sorts, if you have a lot of books, a lot of scrolling is involved.
Amazon, following public opinion on it’s forums, stepped in to address this (partially) by adding something called Collections, a collection is essentially a smart folder that can contain your books. Collections can be named pretty much as you want them to be and a book can be in numerous collections at once, so you can have Sherlock Holmes listed in Classics, Detectives, Doyle and wherever else you want to have it listed. Don’t worry though, duplicate copies of the books are not stored, rather the book has a tag added to it (invisible for you) that tell’s the Kindle where to display it.
The only problem with Collections for us neat freaks is that once you have created categories or a structure to put your books in, you usually tend to want to have that structure visible on the home screen and sorted (usually alphabetically), further neat freaks also only want collections on the main page and not books, so how do you do this?
Basic Structure
The trick here, is to be careful with the way you set up your collections at the beginning but don’t worry if you make a mistake, you can always rename or even delete a collection and the books are unaffected. So what do I mean when I say to be careful? I mean that you need to employ the use of special characters, characters such as > or |> or # or ___ and put them at the beginning of your collections name, followed by digits, at least three or four to give you some room to play and then the actual name you would like the collection to have. So consider this example;
|> 000 Currently Reading
|> 010 Read
|> 020 Samples
|> 100 Fiction
|> 110 Sci-Fi
|> 120 Historical Fiction
|> 200 Non-Fiction
|> 300 Cookery
The |> characters at the beginning of the name will ensure that if you sort your Kindle alphabetically, these collections will ALWAYS be on the main home screen.
The digits ensure that the collections display in the order that you want them to, in essence the order of importance for you. In the example above, I use the hundred’s 100, 200, 300 as main categories and the tens’s, 110, 120, as sub-categories, that way if I wanted to further break down historical fiction, I could add another collection |> 121 British Historical Fiction for example or just use it to add a “spacer” for a more visually pleasing list but I will come to that.
You don’t have to use this method, some people prefer to use alphabetic characters such as AAA, BBB and so on, it’s entirely up to you what you feel comfortable with, I prefer this way though because to my eye at least it looks more like a table of contents or an index that I am used to and my brain discards the characters at the beginning allowing me to focus on the name, whereas with the AAA system, I couldn’t stop myself from reading the AAA’s at the start too.
Visual Improvements
So now we have a basic structure that we can find our way around in but wouldn’t it look nice if there was some breathing room there too? Some space between the categories or perhaps a way to stop individual books from displaying beneath the list so that it, the list, was the only thing visible on the home screen?
Unfortunately there is no built in way of doing this, so as with the method above, we have to employ some tricks in order to accomplish this. Lets look ay adding some space first.
The easy and quick way to add some space between collections and categories is to create a blank collection and give it a name along the lines of
|> 011 _________ or just |> 011. The main advantage here is that this is quick and easy to do, the disadvantage is that as it is a collection, it will display a (0) at the end of the name showing that it contains no books. This may or may not bother you but just for aesthetic sake, let’s assume it does and so the way around it is to use an ebook creator program to create a blank or a 1 page ebook, the filename for the ebook should be the same name that you would give the collection, so in this example |> 011 _______ or |> 011. This will then create the divider or spacer but will not display the book count (0) at the end of it and looks nicer, in my opinion
Finally one other tip that I picked up from the forum that I thought was good, was to indent the names of the sub-categories a bit by using spaces, so if you have the following;
|> 100 Fiction
|> 110 Sci-Fi
You can improve it a little by adding some spaces either at the beginning of the name, before the |> or after it to create an indent, so then the list will look like this;
|> 100 Fiction
XXX|> 110 Sci-fi
NB: The "X" denotes a space, the BB is stripping out the spaces so the example above isn't displaying correctly.
Or like this;
|> 100 Fiction
|>XXXXX110 Sci-Fi
NB: The "X" denotes a space, the BB is stripping out the spaces so the example above isn't displaying correctly.
NB: You cannot create collections or books with just spaces for the name.
Personally for me the first option seems to be the best.
Admittedly this is all a large hack or kludge but it allows you to sort your Kindle and books alphabetically while still maintaining a solid structure on the home page that’s easy to navigate and use.
If you have any further tips, please let me know.
The source forum for this, where all of these ideas came from is located here and my thanks go out to Danica, Wild Reader, Lori Maze and many others.