collections, number of

[crossi]

I've been going in a minimalist direction with collections having each book put in a collection of the author's name and one or at the most two genres. Do you generally limit the number of collections a book is in or put in any and all that might fit it?

[Cinisajoy]

I just try to put them where they fit best.

[CWatkinsNash]

I examine the book to figure out where I'd be most likely to look for it later, then act accordingly. This usually results in them being in no more than two collections. The exception is books in "special" collections, which may also be listed in one or more general genre collections.

I do the same with music, actually. Some of my music genres (of which I use nearly 100 in a prefixed sytem) would make little sense to anyone else, but I'm able to quickly get to what I'm in the mood to listen to.

So, yeah, basically my systems revolve around "how can I find this later without thinking about it too much".

[John K]

Originally Posted by CWatkinsNash

I examine the book to figure out where I'd be most likely to look for it later, then act accordingly. This usually results in them being in no more than two collections. The exception is books in "special" collections, which may also be listed in one or more general genre collections.

I do the same with music, actually. Some of my music genres (of which I use nearly 100 in a prefixed sytem) would make little sense to anyone else, but I'm able to quickly get to what I'm in the mood to listen to.

So, yeah, basically my systems revolve around "how can I find this later without thinking about it too much".

That's an excellent idea!

I already do that in the physical world. If I have trouble finding something, I put it back in the first place I looked.

[pwalker8]

One of the nice things about Calibre is that it supports putting a book in multiple collections. For the most part, I put books in first their basic collection, thus all SF&F books go into the SF collection, all history books go in the history collection, etc.. Then individual books go into additional collections. For example, I have a collection called favorites, which is where I put all my favorite books that I re-read a lot. Goldsworthy's history on the Punic Wars goes into History and Ancient History and Roman History.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by crossi

I've been going in a minimalist direction with collections having each book put in a collection of the author's name and one or at the most two genres. Do you generally limit the number of collections a book is in or put in any and all that might fit it?

Personally, I don't use collections. I do add the series info to the metadata (which may not necessarily be a real series unless you consider "Microsoft SCCM" as a series) and use search to locate what I am looking for. I find it takes me fewer keystrokes to locate a book using search than any other way. If I put the ebooks currently on my ereader into collections based on author name, series and genre, I would have over 1000 collections.

An sample search would be looking for a book in David Weber/John Ringo's Empire of Man series. To search for the books, I simple enter emp in the search box, tap Empire of Man in the suggestions and there are the 4 books in the series. This does have some issues with series such as the Grantville Gazette, J. D. Robb's In Death or Terry Pratchett's Discworld where the series has 40-70 books in it so you are paging through multiple screens. Equally easy to search by title or author -- simply entering wr brings up Patricia C. Wrede as a suggestion. Note that the search is not limited to starting at the first character of a series, title or author name -- entering laz brings up Roger Zelazny as a search suggestion.

At other times, I simply open the library page and enter a random number for the page number to pick a book more or less at random.

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by crossi

I've been going in a minimalist direction with collections having each book put in a collection of the author's name and one or at the most two genres. Do you generally limit the number of collections a book is in or put in any and all that might fit it?

My collections are set up on the KA1 by Calibre. I have these:

- Author's Name
- Book Series (if any)
- And a specific collection from the "Collections" column, if I designate it.

For example, I have the two (or are there more now?) free Fierce Reads short story anthologies published by Tor.com.

They are in the following collections:

- Various (anthologies all have the 'Various' author in my library)
- Fierce Reads
- Short Stories (added in the Collections column)

That's basically it

[Dusky Rose]

I usually have mine with only one collection name in the tags, but I have a *lot* of collections.

Mys.Anth
Mys.Amateur
Mys.Brit
Mys.Cozy
Mys.Fed
Mys.Forensic
Mys.Hist
etc. As needed

I also put the series info in the title field, before the title of the book.

Over the years, I've found that the book's place in a series is more important that the title. Putting the info in the title just saves me time when saving epubs for backup, and I find it easier to see and work with than having them in separate columns.

[Phogg]

I have books in genre collections.

Then if there is a series I like enough to re-read I will also put those books in a series collection.
On top of those groupings I also have a collection of maybe twenty books that I re-read to cheer myself up sometimes.

No book is in more than three collections.

[crich70]

On my Kindle I try to put books into collections based on Genre. Western, Sci.Fi & Fantasy, Writing, Religion etc. so I know which general folder to look in for a given book.

[crossi]

I've got over a thousand books on my kindle organized by collection of author's name. This puts my home page at 11 pages which is manageable. So many people say they only keep a few books on their kindle and download any they want to read from the archive. This is a problem for me because I generally rename books in a series to show the series number. This of course would not show in the archive, nor would the books I buy elsewhere. Still, I was trying to find a way to actually use the archive (I at the moment never even have wifi ever turned on, everything is sideloaded). I've been going through all thousand so books in Amazon's Manage your Content page and adding collections of Name, Series, and one or more Genres. This has been a real pain, it is incredibly slow and keeps making you put your password back in and putting you back at the start of the list. Horribly written software that. Does anybody actually use Amazon's Manage your Content for their collections? I do like the idea of being able to set it up and have it download to all your devices. I've never used it. Do the collections appear in your archived books or only show in your downloaded books? Does that vary by device?

[Ripplinger]

The only collections I use are the series name and one genre per book only. I can already sort by author so don't really need another collection by author. And I only have about 40 genres as well, they're not broken down into a dozen different mystery types for instance, it's just Mystery. It actually drives me nuts when the metadata in Calibre adds 20 different genres and I always clean that up to just one.