Organising stuff on your Kindle

[aproudlove]

@JainaSJedi Sorry for not replying sooner but it has been real busy at work so I haven't been on forums too much, so I missed this, my apologies.

I still have to read through the rest of the thread but just in case you still have I problem one of the things that you need to do once you have created collections using special characters at the start is to set the sort to Title, this will sort everything alphabetically and then your collections should stay in the correct order.

[aproudlove]

@Sydney's mom
I also don't like to see the books on the screen either once they're sorted into Collections so I do exactly what has been suggested elsewhere in the thread and I have a couple of blank collections on the second page that are pretty much |> 011 _____________
just to give me two pages of collections with no books visible on them. Plus If I need more collections for anything in the future I can just rename them.

[Iridal]

Originally Posted by JainaSJedi

I tried that too. Now my sorting goes like this when sorted by title:
xxx|>101 Author 1
xxx|>102 Author 2
xxx|>201 Star Wars
xxx|>202 Star Trek
|>100 Authors
|>200 Sci Fi

I will play around with it some more.

Originally Posted by emalvick

Yes, I tried it out myself last night after my suggestion, and I ended up the same way, although the view didn't even show the indentation. I'm not sure (at the moment) what else could be done. I do know there are other characters (symbols) that are ignored in sorting that could perhaps be used as place holders/elements to tab by.

Has anyone found a solution yet ? I really like the idea of having collections like this:
|>100 Fantasy
xxxx|>110 Jim Butcher
xxxx|>110 Trudi Canavan
and so on.

I've tried a couple of things but none of them seemed to work ...

[aproudlove]

Maybe try _______|>
I think it clips the spaces

[Crowl]

Originally Posted by Nyssa

According to the site, yes they do save your collections, but I do not believe it would transfer over from one Kindle to another. Although, I really do not know that for sure.

According to the manual, collection info is synched across devices, at first a book wouldn't be in the collection on your second device, but once you moved it onto that device as well then it would automatically show up as being in a collection.

[emalvick]

Originally Posted by aproudlove

Maybe try _______|>
I think it clips the spaces

While I haven't tried this, I think the problem may come in with this in alphabetizing.

My earlier suggestion to try to precede with spaces, I thought would work because I knew the Kindle would trim the spaces for sorting. The problem is that it also trimmed the spaces for display. I think using the ____ would create the indent, but I think it would sort such that the underscores would all group together rather than indent per heading as the user (and many of us) would probably like (much like we'd like sub-collections).

I could be wrong though, and I don't have my Kindle at this moment to try.

[Iridal]

Originally Posted by emalvick

While I haven't tried this, I think the problem may come in with this in alphabetizing.

My earlier suggestion to try to precede with spaces, I thought would work because I knew the Kindle would trim the spaces for sorting. The problem is that it also trimmed the spaces for display. I think using the ____ would create the indent, but I think it would sort such that the underscores would all group together rather than indent per heading as the user (and many of us) would probably like (much like we'd like sub-collections).

I could be wrong though, and I don't have my Kindle at this moment to try.

You're right I tried it, every collection preceded by _____ is moved to the end of the list of collections.

[emalvick]

The only thing I can think of with respect to the organization items originally discussed in this thread and obtaining and indent would be to utilize the special characters and numbering at the beginning of the collection name and then insert a lot of spaces after the number....

e.g.:

|> 100 Major Collection
|> 101 __________ Minor Collection
|> 200 Major Collection 2
|> 201 __________ Minor Collection A
|> 202 __________ Minor Collection B

("replacing the underscores with spaces might work here").

I can see this as a reasonable (albeit clunky) work around in that the line spacing on the menu pages should keep things reasonable. The underscores may end up a distraction, so my intention is for spaces to work, if they do. If they don't some other simple and unobtrusive symbol may work as well. The key is keeping the numbers at the left, which is probably fine since most of us would probably just as soon not see the numbers. You could even add spaces to the first heading just making sure that you stagger them as is comfortable for your viewing. The idea is to create an artificial indent or margin while still keeping with the Kindles tendency to want everything left justified.

[stargazir]

I like these collection structure examples and am planning on trialing it. My big question though is whats the easiest way to start. I currently have about 350 books on my kindle, all of which are not sorted. Whats the easiest way to put them into collections? My thought is that I should delete them all off my kindle (I installed Calibre so think its just a matter of moving them to my PC library then deleting them off my Kindle) then add small numbers at a time and add them to the categories. I'm open to easiest suggestions though??

[FF2]

You can try using this link - it uses existing folder structure to create collections:

http://www.accwebworks.com/kindle.aspx

[stargazir]

Originally Posted by FF2

You can try using this link - it uses existing folder structure to create collections:

http://www.accwebworks.com/kindle.aspx

Nice thanks.

I'm guessing I just cut and paste all of my existing books from my Kindle onto my PC before doing this. Then I just create folders to move them all around.

I don't currently have any files on my PC, they were all sent to my Kindle via whispersync

[colinsky]

Originally Posted by aproudlove

So consider this example;

|> 000 Currently Reading
|> 010 Read
|> 020 Samples
|> 100 Fiction
|> 110 Sci-Fi
|> 120 Historical Fiction
|> 200 Non-Fiction
|> 300 Cookery

I am moved to suggest the following alternative, of which I was divinely inspired.

000 – Computer science, information and general works
100 – Philosophy and psychology
200 – Religion
300 – Social sciences
400 – Language
500 – Science (including mathematics)
600 – Technology and applied Science
700 – Arts and recreation
800 – Literature
900 – History, geography, and biography

[FF2]

Originally Posted by stargazir

Nice thanks.

I'm guessing I just cut and paste all of my existing books from my Kindle onto my PC before doing this. Then I just create folders to move them all around.

I don't currently have any files on my PC, they were all sent to my Kindle via whispersync

Actually, you can use it directly on the kindle using usb and looking at the kindle as another drive which is how I did it. Something like:

dir g:\documents /b /s > collections.txt

Where g: would be the usb drive that the kindle shows up as. Although, frankly, having a copy of your kindle's files and folders as a backup might still be a good idea.

[loximuthal]

Originally Posted by colinsky

I am moved to suggest the following alternative, of which I was divinely inspired.

Or you could get really book-nerdy and use LC.

[vaniaspeedy]

I feel like the issue of the lack of categories is very damaging to the kindle. I've decided to start an email campaign to the Kindle Tech Support in order to make this issue heard. Send an email to them explaining what you want and why it's good for amazon (happy customers, better than the Nook, etc). If enough people do this, they will respond.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/conta...e_id=200212360