What's a useful way to organize your books?

[mrsuitcase]

I just got my kindle and ordered a gazillion books (mostly free). Now I have trouble finding them/knowing what I have.

What way have you organized your books into collections which has proved helpful and logical? By genre? Read vs Unread?

I'm not a very organized individual, so I'm looking for a little advise before things get out of control!

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks in advance,

Justin

[jlmwrite]

It's... Too... Late... You have already gathered an armload of books and thrown them onto your Kindle. Now you'll never, ever be able to dig your way through the electronic shelf stuffed full of e-goodies because you'll continue to dump a book here and a book there on top of the unorganized stacks. RUN AWAY QUICKLY!

OK fine: you have lots of options.

You already know about organizing using Kindle's somewhat limited 'collections' tool. It's up to you to decide what's most meaningful to you: by author, genre, unread, etc. Everyone organizes their collections by what makes the most sense to them. If you're brave, you can also try either the Kindle Collection Manager or Kindelabra to help better organize your collections via your PC. Both of these are home-grown software and have some limitations but help those of us with a large number of collections.

What I've done is to first group my collections by author and series (ie, "Nelson DeMille - John Corey series", "Nelson DeMille - Paul Brenner series", "Patricia Cornwell - Kay Scarpetta series", "John Sanford - Lucas Davenport series", and so on.).

Then for authors who don't have series -- like the vast majority of Stephen King's books -- I just create a collections with the author's name (ie, "Stephen King", "Bill Bryson", "John Grisham", and so on).

Finally, I have some books grouped as genre such as "Emergency medicine", "Critical care medicine", and "Masonic books". This still leaves me with a ton of one-off novels but it is what it is.

I generally keep my Kindle sorted by collections. When I'm trying to find the last couple of novels I've added, I'll change my sort by date. This isn't a perfect system by any means, but it's a workable solution 'til Amazon sees fit to give us a better method.

Perhaps some of the amazing contributors here may have words of wisdom to help. You may also want to try to read some of the older posts about collections to see if anything sparks your imagination.

Now go read a book!

[djambalawa]

Hey people this is a dumb question I'm sure.. but... My kindle just arrived and I can't connect to a wireless network with it until I get home from work - so I've just downloaded a few books from the glutenburg site to try it out. Basically i just downloaded the kindle version to the PC and then copied them into the "documents" folder on the kindle. Is this ok? I can read them ok but I'm wondering how I can organise these better - I tried putting them into sub folders on the kindle but they are still all just listed on the kindles home screen in a list.

[ATDrake]

Yes, putting your downloaded books in the "documents" folder is how it's supposed to work. In order to organize them on the Kindle, you'll need to set up Collections from within the Kindle itself. There's also some sort of Windows app for doing it on your computer, written by one of our very own MR members.

While putting your books into subfolders doesn't do anything to sort them on the Kindle itself, it can serve a useful purpose. I split up my books into various subfolders for library books, favourite books I want to keep and have with me at all times, books I actually went and bought, free books I'm just trying out, etc.

This way I can easily back up any new samples/purchases from Amazon (gets downloaded into the top-level of the documents folder, after which I move them) as well as the .mbp files for the notes and highlights from my non-Amazon books. It also makes it easier to delete stuff I'm no longer reading/just couldn't finish.

Hope this helps, and welcome to MobileRead, both of you!

[desertblues]

Some threads that might be helpfull:

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...ht=Collections

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...ht=Collections

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...ht=Collections

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...ht=Collections

For the first two you might need some computerskills and they're made to work with Windows.
The last two threads work with the Collections you can make with your Kindle itself.

Good luck and think hard before you putting any book in a collection. Using Calibre, which is an excellent free program, can be a great help as well : as your personal library.
Write down what you want, consider and reconsider; because if you've organised a lot of books and you want to change that again...............

[foghat]

I too went into this thinking I'd put all my books on my kindle. But, imo, it is too much work trying to organize everything with kindles limited functionality. I now just put books I haven't read on. Not ideal, whatever.

[desertblues]

Take heart. It really is doable. For simple collections:

- name the collection with a symbol in front, for example:
_(underscore), open space, name collection
_ A. Novel A-G
_ A. Novel H-Z
and so on, Kindle will sort alphabethically inside a name as well.

To view collections in alphabetical order: let them be shown by title.(top of the screen). That will give the names of the collections first (in the right alphab.order) and then all of your books.

To organize your books in a collection: make/name a collection and enter it.
--menu--add/remove items--enter-- select book from list.....enter=add item to collection....,and go on to the next book on this/next page OR you can add a whole page (add/remove items--enter--menu--add all items on this page) and on to the next book.

To see if you have organized all your books in collections;
let(top of the screen) the books be shown in 'collections'....it gives you (the names of) the collections first, than the un-organized books--and Archives.

When there's still a book to organize:
select that book---press right on 5-way- enter- and organize in a collection (select- enter-back-back), or if there's a lot of books.... go into the collection you want the books to be organized in, and proceed as above (=organizing a whole page).

Good luck again.

[Baldrake]

Yikes, there's really no way to organize collections within Calibre?

[FF2]

One other thing you can do is books can be in more than one collection - it is like a windows' shortcut, it does not create two (space consuming) copies of the book.

So, if a book is SciFi, you can place it in the SciFi collection and if it is UNread or NEW, you can also place it in Unread Collection and find it that way.

[foghat]

Originally Posted by Baldrake

Yikes, there's really no way to organize collections within Calibre?

Nope.

[desertblues]

Originally Posted by Baldrake

Yikes, there's really no way to organize collections within Calibre?

No, not really, in my opinion.

What you could do also ( instead of loading all the books in one go):
Create a collection on the Kindle.
Select all the books you want in that specific collection from Calibre; download on your Kindle.
On the Kindle: go to that collection and organize those specific books. This first collection can be organised by 'add all items on this page'.
And on to the next; create another collection and load again the specific books for that collection and organize them.

I know, it takes time, but you could also try the (windows)managers of the previous thread.

Most of the time I do this in front of the TV.

Good luck.

[djambalawa]

Thanks for the pointers all