Organising stuff on your Kindle

[aproudlove]

Hi,
I put together an article on my blog http://aproudlove.squarespace.com about some good methods to organise collections and books on your Kindle, based on a discussion that I am involved in on the Amazon forums.

The reason I am posting it here, is that I'd like to try and make this as comprehensive as I can, especially as there are a lot of new users (me included) that I think can benefit from it. So I wanted to ask on here if any of you have any other ideas or suggestions that I can add to it? I would really appreciate it.

I've included the article here below for you to see and edit as well; It's quite long though, I like to waffle

TIA for your help.

One of the advantages of the newer Kindle models is that you now have 4 GB of space on the device itself for storing books, depending on the size the files take up physically in the memory, thats around 3-4 thousand books, as you can no doubt imagine, having to scroll through page after page in order to find the book you’re looking for is not the most practical or efficient way to do it.

Sure you can move your cursor to the top of the home screen and change the way that the books are ordered, by displaying Most Recent First for example, which is great (but not always, I’ll explain why in a minute) to find something that you have just added to your device but not much else. You can sort by Author but if you’re looking for something and the authors name begins with an R, you’re going to be going through a lot of pages again. Or to return to my aforementioned explanation, just yesterday I was trying to sync a newspaper to my Kindle, I received the confirmation emails that it had been sent but I couldn’t find it on my home screen, even when I sorted by most recent, yet if I went into search and typed in the name there it was. So I did a little digging and it had been placed automatically into a collection called Periodicals, that had been placed, can you guess? Of course you can, on the last page, even when sorted by most recent.

Another way to sort things is Alphabetically, which seems to be the default sort order that the majority of people prefer, after all, most of us tend to be organised to some kind of extent and it’s always nice to be able to get to something fast but even with Alphabetical sorts, if you have a lot of books, a lot of scrolling is involved.

Amazon, following public opinion on it’s forums, stepped in to address this (partially) by adding something called Collections, a collection is essentially a smart folder that can contain your books. Collections can be named pretty much as you want them to be and a book can be in numerous collections at once, so you can have Sherlock Holmes listed in Classics, Detectives, Doyle and wherever else you want to have it listed. Don’t worry though, duplicate copies of the books are not stored, rather the book has a tag added to it (invisible for you) that tell’s the Kindle where to display it.

The only problem with Collections for us neat freaks is that once you have created categories or a structure to put your books in, you usually tend to want to have that structure visible on the home screen and sorted (usually alphabetically), further neat freaks also only want collections on the main page and not books, so how do you do this?

Basic Structure

The trick here, is to be careful with the way you set up your collections at the beginning but don’t worry if you make a mistake, you can always rename or even delete a collection and the books are unaffected. So what do I mean when I say to be careful? I mean that you need to employ the use of special characters, characters such as > or |> or # or ___ and put them at the beginning of your collections name, followed by digits, at least three or four to give you some room to play and then the actual name you would like the collection to have. So consider this example;

|> 000 Currently Reading


|> 010 Read


|> 020 Samples


|> 100 Fiction


|> 110 Sci-Fi


|> 120 Historical Fiction


|> 200 Non-Fiction


|> 300 Cookery

The |> characters at the beginning of the name will ensure that if you sort your Kindle alphabetically, these collections will ALWAYS be on the main home screen.

The digits ensure that the collections display in the order that you want them to, in essence the order of importance for you. In the example above, I use the hundred’s 100, 200, 300 as main categories and the tens’s, 110, 120, as sub-categories, that way if I wanted to further break down historical fiction, I could add another collection |> 121 British Historical Fiction for example or just use it to add a “spacer” for a more visually pleasing list but I will come to that.

You don’t have to use this method, some people prefer to use alphabetic characters such as AAA, BBB and so on, it’s entirely up to you what you feel comfortable with, I prefer this way though because to my eye at least it looks more like a table of contents or an index that I am used to and my brain discards the characters at the beginning allowing me to focus on the name, whereas with the AAA system, I couldn’t stop myself from reading the AAA’s at the start too.

Visual Improvements

So now we have a basic structure that we can find our way around in but wouldn’t it look nice if there was some breathing room there too? Some space between the categories or perhaps a way to stop individual books from displaying beneath the list so that it, the list, was the only thing visible on the home screen?

Unfortunately there is no built in way of doing this, so as with the method above, we have to employ some tricks in order to accomplish this. Lets look ay adding some space first.

The easy and quick way to add some space between collections and categories is to create a blank collection and give it a name along the lines of

|> 011 _________ or just |> 011. The main advantage here is that this is quick and easy to do, the disadvantage is that as it is a collection, it will display a (0) at the end of the name showing that it contains no books. This may or may not bother you but just for aesthetic sake, let’s assume it does and so the way around it is to use an ebook creator program to create a blank or a 1 page ebook, the filename for the ebook should be the same name that you would give the collection, so in this example |> 011 _______ or |> 011. This will then create the divider or spacer but will not display the book count (0) at the end of it and looks nicer, in my opinion

Finally one other tip that I picked up from the forum that I thought was good, was to indent the names of the sub-categories a bit by using spaces, so if you have the following;

|> 100 Fiction


|> 110 Sci-Fi

You can improve it a little by adding some spaces either at the beginning of the name, before the |> or after it to create an indent, so then the list will look like this;

|> 100 Fiction


XXX|> 110 Sci-fi

NB: The "X" denotes a space, the BB is stripping out the spaces so the example above isn't displaying correctly.

Or like this;

|> 100 Fiction


|>XXXXX110 Sci-Fi

NB: The "X" denotes a space, the BB is stripping out the spaces so the example above isn't displaying correctly.

NB: You cannot create collections or books with just spaces for the name.

Personally for me the first option seems to be the best.

Admittedly this is all a large hack or kludge but it allows you to sort your Kindle and books alphabetically while still maintaining a solid structure on the home page that’s easy to navigate and use.

If you have any further tips, please let me know.

The source forum for this, where all of these ideas came from is located here and my thanks go out to Danica, Wild Reader, Lori Maze and many others.

[DreamWriter]

Thanks so much for sharing these tips! Your numbering system seems more visually pleasing than my current method of naming Collections with special characters in front, so I think I'll give this a try! I like your idea of subnumbering (100 Fiction, 110 Sci-Fi, etc.).

[Snakey]

I'm using something similar with special characters to get my collections to appear first when sorting by title, but I have this weird issue where one of my three collections is called 'Dictionaries and is supposed to appear third from the top but if I do a system reboot it moves and gets placed alphabetically under D. If I rename the collection to anything else and then revert it back to 'Dictionaries again it goes back to third from the top under `Books and `Samples where it's supposed to be. Very strange, anyone else experience this?

[aproudlove]

@Dreamwriter - Thanks, you're more than welcome, if you have any ideas on how I can improve it to, that would be great.

@Snakey I think you probably have it set to sort by most recent perhaps? So that would cause it to display higher in the list? What collections do you have on your home screen?

[Snakey]

Originally Posted by aproudlove

@Dreamwriter - Thanks, you're more than welcome, if you have any ideas on how I can improve it to, that would be great.

@Snakey I think you probably have it set to sort by most recent perhaps? So that would cause it to display higher in the list? What collections do you have on your home screen?

No, I have it set to sort by title, and then I put special characters in front of each collection name. And the first two collections, which start with ` do stay at the top at all times. My third collection which I've tried different symbols with, is the one that acts funny. It's called 'Dictionaries and after a reboot it sinks down into the D's. If I rename it and name it back it will pop back up to the top again. Maybe I need to experiment with different symbols since the ones with ` always stay on top. It's not that big a deal, I just thought it was on-topic and had been bugging me. It's an odd behavior that sometimes it will ignore the symbol and sometimes it will respect it.

[aproudlove]

I think that the apostrophe is being ignored in the sorts, the only reason that it appears at the top in the correct place in your list when you edit it, I would assume is because you modified it. I think youre right though, that if you change the apostrophe for something else that isn't ignored by the sorting, then it will be fine.

Cheers,

Andrew

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http://aproudlove.squarespace.com

[HarryT]

I generally use an underscore ("_") to prefix my collection names. This does sort first alphabetically.

[JainaSJedi]

@aproudlove

Thank you for the detailed instructions on sorting collections on the Kindle. I am having a few problems with the |> plus spacing and the ordering of my collections and sub-collections. Ultimately, I would like the home screen of the Kindle to look like an outline of a term paper, if that's possible. For example,

|>200 Sci Fi
|>xxxxx201 Star Wars
|>xxxxx202 Star Trek
|>300 Fantasy
|>xxxxx301 Sword of Truth

Again, the xxx denote spaces.

The problem that I am having is when I move to a new main collection (|>300 Fantasy Collection) and the corresponding sub-collections (|>xxxxx301 Sword of Truth).

My Kindle will either display the main collections at the top or the bottom of the home page followed by the sub-collections as in:

|> 200 Sci Fi
|> 300 Fantasy
|>xxxxx201 Star Wars
|>xxxxx202 Star Trek
|>xxxxx301 Sword of Truth

Is there a way to fix it so it displays properly? I have also been using the Kindle Collection Manager to help name these collections.

[Nyssa]

That looks great!

I also like JainaSJedi's sub-collection idea and would love to see any suggestions there.

Thank you for the post Aproudlove.

[sadievan]

Don't know if this is normal or not.

If I set my Kindle to sort by Collections, the books that are in the collections do not show up outside of the collections with the rest of the books. If I set it to sort by Title, they show up outside the collections also.

Is this normal?

Carol

[Nyssa]

Originally Posted by sadievan

Don't know if this is normal or not.

If I set my Kindle to sort by Collections, the books that are in the collections do not show up outside of the collections with the rest of the books. If I set it to sort by Title, they show up outside the collections also.

Is this normal?

Carol

Yes, that is normal. The collections will always show up as "Most Recent", whether it is the most recently created or the most recently accessed.

[sadievan]

Originally Posted by Nyssa

Yes, that is normal. The collections will always show up as "Most Recent", whether it is the most recently created or the most recently accessed.

Yes the collections show up as most recent. But what I am confused about is if I set it up to sort by collections, the books in the collections DO NOT show up with the rest of the books outside of the collections. If I set it up to sort by Title, the books show up in BOTH the collections and the list of books outside the collections. Hope I'm making myself clear.

Thanks,
Carol

[Nyssa]

Originally Posted by sadievan

Yes the collections show up as most recent. But what I am confused about is if I set it up to sort by collections, the books in the collections DO NOT show up with the rest of the books outside of the collections. If I set it up to sort by Title, the books show up in BOTH the collections and the list of books outside the collections. Hope I'm making myself clear.

Thanks,
Carol

Yes, unfortunatly that is the way it happens. Both the book & the collection will show up when sorting by Title - with the book also listed in the collection.

[sadievan]

Originally Posted by Nyssa

Yes, unfortunatly that is the way it happens. Both the book & the collection will show up when sorting by Title - with the book also listed in the collection.

Thanks for clearing that up for me.

Carol

[Nyssa]

Originally Posted by sadievan

Thanks for clearing that up for me.

Carol

You're welcome!