[Gary_M_Mugford]

I've worked out a system that works for me. Maybe you can adjust/improve. I have a Hotness column, a Status column and a Genre column. Hotness (H on screen), is a numeric column with 1 being the value for wanting to read it NOW! 2 is for the next book in series that I follow and 3 is non-books, such as news articles, short story collections, etc. I used to have a 9 default Hotness rating, but leaving it blank for books you get from where ever, but don't immediately plan to put on the Kindle, can have a blank hotness rating. If I think something with a higher hotness rating than 1 will get lost in the shuffle (a next volume of a series, for example). I will delete the book off the device in calibre, change the hotness setting, and re-send. Mostly, however, I seem to be able to forego this step. Afterall, I was really hot to trot over the earlier book in the series.

I use the Status column (S) to indicate whether the book is on my kindle (3), to be exported to my kindle on the next update (X), read (R) or is a problem (P). The P's are almost always Doc's that I haven't printed to HTML yet. The genre column is a reduction of the tags column to a series of two letters per tag. I use very few generic tags, but if you are a heavy tags user, then create a genre column directly and use it for short-form values like My, SF, Sp, Ro, etc.

On update Saturday, I sort the database by Hotness reversed, then by Status. It's easy to find the various sections when the Kindle is plugged in. A 3 status with no On Device setting is a book that I've read and deleted from the Kindle. I change the status to R and then rate the book. X status books are sent to the Kindle, and then the X is mass changed to a 3. That's it for the calibre handling of the operation. Note, you can assign status's for multiple readers, if you choose. I'd still keep it as one letter, by YMMV.

On the Kindle, I sort by title and I get all of the hottest books up front. Then they are segmented by the genre tag. So, I will see [1My] for a bunch of titles, [1NF] for a couple more, then the [1SF], etc. I usually have about three pages of 'hot' titles. After the hot ones come follow-up books in series, books I 'think' I want to read, but don't excite me and new authors I'm going to try out ... when I get the itch to experiment or want to read what everybody else seems to be reading. While I have a LOT of books in Calibre, I try to keep the selection actually on the reader down in the sub-100 area. That ALWAYS leaves me with enough choice.

When I finish reading a book, it's HOME, select Most Recent, Left and delete the book. Then I select By Title and instantly I have a 2-3 page list of what I am interested in, sorted by genre. And I try to switch genre with each book, unless I've got a trilogy going that's all hot for me. chrome://informenter/skin/marker.png

Other people use collections and my system, while easy to adapt to multiple people, is single reader-focused. But I find that the time spent clicking on the Kindle is incredibly short. And thus, I get more reading done.

Which, afterall, is the goal of any organizational system.