Quote:
Originally Posted by kiwidude
@meme or others. Apologies if this has been asked before. A colleague I put onto using this plugin is doing the following:
- generating collections in the plugin using authors
- maintaining a "currently reading" collection on the Kindle
- also maintaining a "read" collection on the kindle
Now as he has just setup his Kindle with loads of books with this plugin, he has quite a number that he would like to add to his "read" collection to begin with. Doing it manually on the Kindle will be the ongoing behaviour, but to setup his initial set is way too slow/clunky to do on the Kindle itself.
He was trying to use the "Edit collections manually" function in the plugin, but couldn't really get it to do what he wanted in a convenient way (he didn't really want to scroll down lists of thousands of books within there).
Is there a recommended way to do that with this plugin? My own usage is of the most basic functionality that you stuck way back in the original versions and I haven't paid close attention to all the stuff since then that might help. Right now he has no record other than in his head of which books he has "read" and wants to put in this collection (i.e. no special tags or custom column in calibre).
Perhaps one way might be to mark them all in calibre using a tag or custom column (which is a bit more convenient for searching/filtering), use the plugin to create a specific collection based on that column as a once off, then remove that mapping so he can then maintain it manually on the Kindle (or something). But I am just guessing, perhaps someone here has a better idea.
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No need to apologize - its almost impossible to tell if a question has been asked before around here, and even if it had I'm sure I wouldn't remember if it had
I assume the "read" collection is "Done reading"? Its not relevant, but "Read" always drives me crazy when I use it because I can never remember which way I meant it
If he wants to keep his "Read" collection editable only on the Kindle, and it already contains data we can't generate it from Calibre, maybe.
If the only record of what is 'read' is in his head then he will have to identify the books as read at some point. Using the Edit Collection manually function lets him select which books to add and still update it on the Kindle. But you say he doesn't want to scroll through all the books (even though they can be sorted by title, author, date) to find the books. Hmmm. Well, what would make it easier to find them? (And if you say a search box, then I might reduce some of your Karma
)
I can understand it if there are thousands of books - you mark a few, leave it, mark some later. With the manual edit it takes a while. So maybe marking it in Calibre is an approach.
I think the recommendation of moving to keeping track of this data solely in calibre and exporting it is best, but not everyone wants to work that way, at least at first.
Here's one probably way to do this, although I haven't tested it as it starts to get a bit messy...
Make a backup copy of collections.json from the Kindle to the PC just in case!
Setup a custom column, "My Kindle Collections" as comma separated like tags, and another one called 'Red' (
).
Use the plugin to Import Collections into the column 'My Kindle collections'
Select "Read" from that column in the tag browser
select all the books
Edit metadata
Add a new tag to the "Red" column called "Read"
In the main book window, add "Read" to that column for all the books that have been read for as many as you want until done
When ready Customize the plugin to create the "Red" column
Run create collections
Remove the "Red" column from Customization when done using it so that it doesn't get written out again
Edit the "Read" collection on the Kindle as necessary
Run Create Collections as needed to just generate your author collections leaving "Read" alone
I suppose you could also just import into My Kindle Collections, delete all the tags that are not "Read", add "Read" to any book already read, and customize/run create to generate collections based on My Kindle Collections one time too - saves the extra column.