Collection help needed...

[Lozh]

Hi all,

Just found this forum so thought I'd give it a try! I have a Kindle and am wondering if there is an easy way to create collections without having to click into each book. I have quite a few series or books by the same author and it's driving me nuts having to click on each one to put them to a collection.

Can anyone help?

Thanks!

[HarryT]

There's a much faster way to do it.

Highlight the collection name, press the right arrow, then select "add/remove items". You'll then be shown a list of all your books and can quickly add or remove them from the collection.

[Lozh]

Is there a way to do it on a computer and then transfer it over to the Kindle? I'm being super lazy today!

[HarryT]

There are various tools for the PC which let you manage collections; look around the forum and you'll find discussion of them. I manage all my collections on the Kindle, so I don't use them myself; the method I described above makes managing collections very quick to do.

[Lozh]

Cool thanks. By the time I go searching for another way to do it, I could have done it on the Kindle directly!

[CRussel]

If you use Calibre, there's an excellent Collections plug-in for it that works well and lets you manage all your collections from within Calibre.

If you don't use Calibre, you're working too hard.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by CRussel

If you use Calibre, there's an excellent Collections plug-in for it that works well and lets you manage all your collections from within Calibre.

If you don't use Calibre, you're working too hard.

Trouble is, if you use Calibre to manage your collections, then I believe I'm right in saying that you can ONLY use Calibre, in that it will overwrite all your existing collections with its own. I prefer not to do that hence, although I use Calibre for all sorts of other things, I don't use it for that.

[Jack Tingle]

I tend to agree with HarryT. I've never warmed up to Calibre. It's an ebook library manager that makes a few too many assumptions about how I _should_ manage my ebooks, rather than figuring out how I _want_ to manage my ebooks and helping me. If it matches your way of doing things, it's free and great. Otherwise, it's a bit Apple-ish.

Regards,
Jack Tingle

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by Jack Tingle

I tend to agree with HarryT. I've never warmed up to Calibre. It's an ebook library manager that makes a few too many assumptions about how I _should_ manage my ebooks, rather than figuring out how I _want_ to manage my ebooks and helping me. If it matches your way of doing things, it's free and great. Otherwise, it's a bit Apple-ish.

Regards,
Jack Tingle

Don't get me wrong, Jack. I think Calibre's great and I use it for managing all my eBooks. I just don't use it for managing my collections.

[niceboy]

I just sat down and made my collections book-by-book and it was okay. Only frustration is that collections don't list alphabetically in the main home view by collections as far as I can tell -- only in title view.

It is wonderful that a project like Calibre exists and it is clear most people love it but it is so heavy and glitchy and not very end-user friendly for me. I find Stanza easier though I found out too late I have messed up by entering author names as "First Last" rather than "Last, First".

I would shell out some real money for a Kindle native software for editing metadata or a very simple PC based editor that could fix metadata on books residing on the K3.

I sure wish Amazon would implement user created "tags" instead of or as well as Collections. I assume Amazon thinks you don't need to edit metadata for books purchased from them but they should permit on-Kindle metadata fix given they sell books with jumbled author listing from time to time.

[CRussel]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Trouble is, if you use Calibre to manage your collections, then I believe I'm right in saying that you can ONLY use Calibre, in that it will overwrite all your existing collections with its own. I prefer not to do that hence, although I use Calibre for all sorts of other things, I don't use it for that.

No longer true, Harry. The plug-in has been updated to allow you to manage them in multiple ways. I find it saves me a good bit of time. My workflow:
1.) Import current collections into Calibre. This ensures that anything I've done on my own gets reflected into Calibre.
2.) Adjust collections as appropriate with whatever I'm doing in Calibre. (Adding books, moving books from "Mystery" to "ToBeRead", whatever.)
3.) Send any new books to the Kindle.
4.) Write out the Calibre collections settings to the Kindle.
5.) Disconnect and unplug. Kindle will reboot so it can read the collections.json.

[HarryT]

But will it work if I have books and collections on my Kindle that Calibre doesn't know about? When I read the description of the plug-in I got the impression that it wouldn't. I may of course be wrong, since I didn't want to risk messing things up.

[CRussel]

Yes, Harry. You can edit the collections directly on the Kindle through the plugin. And you can also tell the Collections plugin to completely ignore certain collections. However, let me be clear - I haven't ever tested with collections and books I don't have in Calibre. For the simple reason that I don't have any books that aren't in Calibre for any longer than the time it takes to add them from the Kindle to Calibre.

If you have a concern, I'd ask meme first. S/he has been pretty responsive. (And if doesn't do what you want now, it may well trigger a feature update, always a good thing.)

[chamekke]

CRussel,

Thanks for the tips.

I also wanted to check... I've heard the plug-in can also be automated to automatically assign books with certain tags to specific collections. Is that true?

[CRussel]

Originally Posted by chamekke

I also wanted to check... I've heard the plug-in can also be automated to automatically assign books with certain tags to specific collections. Is that true?

Yes, though I don't use it that way. I prefer to manually control my collections.