MobileRead Forums - View Single Post - Content How to organise your library? I use Calibre because Kindle's collections are useless

cd2013 · 03-01-2019, 09:15 AM

How do you Kindle users organise your collections of books, browse through what you have bought, group books into categories, remember what you have read and decide what to read next, etc?

I wish I had known it before buying a Kindle and about 200 books on it, but the Kobos integrate very well with Calibre: books can be tagged and classified with Calibre, and Calibre will very easily create Kobo shelves based on the tags, with no jailbreaking required.

With Kindles, I find that managing more than 100 books is almost impossible. I have no OCD desire to classify them according to multiple criteria – I just want to remember roughly what I have bought and what I haven’t yet read.

The workflow I have come up with basically involves using Calibre to manage the library, and the Kindle to read only; Kindle's collections are too chaotic to be of any real use:

using Calibre to classify and tag the books
then using Calibre, if I am at my PC, or Calibre Companion if I want to do it away from home, as I described here: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...1&postcount=17 , to browse my library; by that I mean remembering what I have bought and decide what to read next
keeping onto the Kindle only the dozen or so books I want to read next
giving up any attempt to use the Kindle to manage and browse the collection

How do other people do it? If I were to rely on the Kindle alone to browse my library and remember what I have bought, I’d go nuts – and this is without a huge library; some people have thousands of books – how do they manage them?

I find Amazon’s Kindle ecosystem sucks at managing libraries because:

Collections created on Kindle for PC are not synced to the other devices
The Amazon website has a function to add books to collections, but it doesn’t work (see my other post: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...d.php?t=315630 )
Collections created on older devices which do not support Cloud Collections cannot be imported (or at least I haven’t found a way)
Basically you can only manage collections on the newer Kindle ereaders, or on the iOS or Android apps. In reality, only on iOS or Android, because managing them from the Kindle takes forever, e.g. to add a book to a collection, you need to select the collection, choose ‘add’, then browse through all the pages till you find the book – you cannot search for the book title.

03-01-2019, 09:15 AM	#1
cd2013 Connoisseur Posts: 54 Karma: 10 Join Date: Dec 2013 Device: Kindle Paperwhite 3G	How to organise your library? I use Calibre because Kindle's collections are useless How do you Kindle users organise your collections of books, browse through what you have bought, group books into categories, remember what you have read and decide what to read next, etc? I wish I had known it before buying a Kindle and about 200 books on it, but the Kobos integrate very well with Calibre: books can be tagged and classified with Calibre, and Calibre will very easily create Kobo shelves based on the tags, with no jailbreaking required. With Kindles, I find that managing more than 100 books is almost impossible. I have no OCD desire to classify them according to multiple criteria – I just want to remember roughly what I have bought and what I haven’t yet read. The workflow I have come up with basically involves using Calibre to manage the library, and the Kindle to read only; Kindle's collections are too chaotic to be of any real use: using Calibre to classify and tag the books then using Calibre, if I am at my PC, or Calibre Companion if I want to do it away from home, as I described here: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...1&postcount=17 , to browse my library; by that I mean remembering what I have bought and decide what to read next keeping onto the Kindle only the dozen or so books I want to read next giving up any attempt to use the Kindle to manage and browse the collection How do other people do it? If I were to rely on the Kindle alone to browse my library and remember what I have bought, I’d go nuts – and this is without a huge library; some people have thousands of books – how do they manage them? I find Amazon’s Kindle ecosystem sucks at managing libraries because: Collections created on Kindle for PC are not synced to the other devices The Amazon website has a function to add books to collections, but it doesn’t work (see my other post: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...d.php?t=315630 ) Collections created on older devices which do not support Cloud Collections cannot be imported (or at least I haven’t found a way) Basically you can only manage collections on the newer Kindle ereaders, or on the iOS or Android apps. In reality, only on iOS or Android, because managing them from the Kindle takes forever, e.g. to add a book to a collection, you need to select the collection, choose ‘add’, then browse through all the pages till you find the book – you cannot search for the book title.