Kindle and Book Collections

[gavinjb]

Hi,

Just trying to get some ideas on ways to easily manage a Series in Kindle, I have found the Metadata from Amazon is poor as for example I can buy one book of a series and it can have title + book 1 of series, while the next book might have just the title.

How do you manage your large series of books, I am currently creating a basic mobi book which lists the reading order (would really love Amazon to add support for the Series metadata like Kobo does), but this is not ideal so after ideas on how to manage better.

[Tarana]

I use Calibre and a plugboard. Works great on Kindles and Nooks. Need to use list rather than grid for title images on your unit. Since my titles can be very long, I put the series first so that I can get the right book.

Google "calibre plugboard series" for a step by step.

[gavinjb]

Thanks for the recommendation, I will have a look at plugboards, I have only ever used Calibre for the basics to date.

[barryem]

I have a couple of series and I've decided to read them in order so I went to http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/ and looked up the authors and copied the series in order into Notepad. Then I copied from Notepad into Google Docs Writer to create a .doc file, which I then sent to my Kindle via Amazon. It got into my Kindle as a mobi file and lists the books in order with titles and years.

Now every time I read one I highlight it and the first one not highlighted is the next book in the series.

Since i have 2 series (the Rabbi Small books and the 87th Precinct series) I put them into the same document and listed the series names at the top of the document and created links to the start of the respective series. This isn't worth doing with 2 series, really, but I thought I might add more to it in time.

Google Docs makes this all pretty simple to do. The entire project took less than 10 minutes. My guess is other word processors will do it as easily but that's the one I used.

Barry

[Lordblacknail]

Reading order can be much different than publishing order. To get the recommended reading order, just google reading order for the book. Once I know the reading order that I want, i put it in word, save as an RTF file then convert it to .azw3 and put it in my author collection. No worries.

[Tarana]

Originally Posted by barryem

I have a couple of series and I've decided to read them in order so I went to http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/ and looked up the authors and copied the series in order into Notepad. Then I copied from Notepad into Google Docs Writer to create a .doc file, which I then sent to my Kindle via Amazon. It got into my Kindle as a mobi file and lists the books in order with titles and years.
Barry

I used to do this and it was a great option, and I still use it selectively. Perfect if you only have one or two ereaders. Once I learned how to do plugboards, that was ideal as any ereader I load the books on will have the series name and number already there. Then, I only have to set it up correctly in Calibre. Your method was perfect when there was a conflict. I set Calibre series in order based on Fantastic Fiction which is typically based on publication. My late sister preferred to read the books in order of timeline - so sometimes they varied.