How to get your sideloaded books into collections (relatively) painlessly

[whitearrow]

So, as we know, there's no way, absent jailbreaking, to move sideloaded books from device to device without losing your collections. After a lot of trial and error, I came up with a way that's easiest, at least for me.

There are a couple of assumptions here:

-- You have a fairly limited number of collections. I have 20 total.

-- Most of my books are only in one (some two) collection(s) on the Kindle, plus "unread," if applicable, on the device. I use more tags in Calibre but not on the Kindle.

-- You manage your Amazon content using cloud collections.

-- You have some way to tell, on Calibre, if the book is from Amazon or not. (I use a custom checkbox, but file format can work, too, if you have sideloaded books in Mobi, or a tag.)

So here's my way of doing this:

-- Start by importing your collections onto the device, but don't download any of your Amazon books yet.

-- Plug the device into the computer and wait for it to appear in Calibre.

-- Click the tag of your largest collection, and if you only want to load your unread books, whatever your tag is for that. You want to do an "and" search here, like "fantasy" and "unread."

-- Sort the books so your Amazon books are separated.

-- Go ahead and transfer to device the "fantasy" and "unread" books.

-- Once the job is done, eject the Kindle.

-- Wait for the Kindle to show the books.

-- Go to List view.

-- On the top under the toolbar, pick "downloaded" "all items" and "collections."

-- Go to your Fantasy collection, select "add/remove items."

-- Again select "downloaded," "all items," and here is what's really important, "Recent."

-- Go ahead and select all the items you just added. All the books on the device should be in your Fantasy category now.

-- Now pick one book from Fantasy that you will remember and REMOVE it from Fantasy. Open the book, then exit. So you should see your categories and your one memorable book.

-- Reconnect the Kindle and pick another category. Repeat the steps above.

-- This time, when you add the new books to the category, the ones you just added will be first. Stop adding when you hit the memorable book.

-- Keep going until all the books you want from Calibre are added. Open your memorable book each time so you will know where to stop. You might want to take some breaks between collections for indexing (see Harry's post on this).

-- If you continue to go collection by collection, your newest books will always be the first ones in the recent sort, and much easier to find and add to that collection. You can do the same if you have different kinds of books sorted into different libraries.

-- Once I had all my unread books added from Calibre, I went and added all of these to my "unread" category. Skip if you don't have one. Then I tweaked, adjusting the books that were in more than one category so they were in the right place.

-- At this point, take another break to allow for indexing. Then you can add whatever you want from your Amazon books, which should already be sorted into the proper collections.

I hope this helps someone.

[driph]

Bumping an old thread to thank you for this, it helped me work out a system to transfer my sideloaded books over with slightly less hassle than I was expecting. :]

[sydmalicious]

Going to bump this. I don’t know what a collection is and how to build them. Going to do a little research tonight.


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[BookCat]

This seems unnecessarily complicated to me. I would just put all the books onto my kindle, then create all the Collections I want, then go through the books clicking the three dots to the left of the title (in list view) and adding each book to the desired collections.

To me, this seems simpler.

[93terp]

Originally Posted by BookCat

This seems unnecessarily complicated to me. I would just put all the books onto my kindle, then create all the Collections I want, then go through the books clicking the three dots to the left of the title (in list view) and adding each book to the desired collections.

To me, this seems simpler.

This would be simple for those with only a few books to sort into Collections. For those of us with hundreds, even thousands of books to put into Collections (and not desiring to jailbreak the Kindle), your method is very time consuming.

[mcandre]

The state of Amazon Kindle Collections is beyond broken in 2023.

* Collections fail to appear in the official Amazon Kindle macOS app.
* Searching and sorting are extremely limited in the official Amazon Kindle macOS app, making collection editing tedious.
* Amazon fails to collaborate with Calibre for syncing Calibre virtual libraries as Kindle collections.
* Manual Collections editing from Calibre requires jailbreaking the Kindle.
* The tutorials about Calibre collection plugins reference dead plugins.
* The WhisperSync Web UI fails to provide collection editing for sideloaded books.
* On-device collection editing has multiple corruption errors. Pagination often fails. Repeated attempts to add books to a collection often silently fail. The relevant buttons eventually become invisible. Likely a sign of severe memory corruption issues in Amazon Kindle's (C/C++?) codebase. Books formerly included in a collection, will mysteriously remove themselves from the collection.
* The bulk collection editor fails to persist the desired sorting settings, further slowing down workflows.
* Near 982 books in a collection, the bulk collection editor rapidly fails to add any more books. On reboot, the collection reverts to an earlier state.

As a workaround, one can select a book in the Kindle library and go through the cumbersome, 8-tap workflow of adding the book to a collection.

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by mcandre

The state of Amazon Kindle Collections is beyond broken in 2023.

There are two simple solutions to the collection mess:

1. Don't use collections
2. Ditch your Kindle and buy a Kobo, on which you can manage everything automatically via Calibre. And it works.

[Kusuri]

When i first got my kindle, i too did use collections. i created for each book series a own collection, but then it got a huge mess. countless collections who where "invisible" because i deleted the books after i read them without first deleting the collection etc..it was just a huge nightmare.

then i stopped using collections completly. nowadays, i create folders in the kindle filesystem. each folder is one book series / "topic".. and i then put the books in there. then i open koreader and use the filebrowser.

that saved me SOOO much hassle. also its keeping the sdr folder seperated etc.. way better experience in my opinion.

[JSWolf]

Since this thread was created, Amazon has significantly changed the UI. Collections do not work the same as they used to and are now really annoying.

Previously you used to be able to get a list view with the collections at the top of the list. That was OK. Now there is a separate collections view that shows you thumbnails and not a list. It's not nice at all.