Content Folders! WE NEED FOLDERS!

[kevindorsey]

This is very useful. I will have to go through this thread again, and make sure I know how to do this.

[Krystian Galaj]

Originally Posted by Thomas Ryan

I think you might be thinking "navigation" vs "underlying data representation"

Consider -

A - my books
B - fiction/non-fiction
C- Author X, Y or Z

I meant more subtle problems that might show up, for example, if a book title is the same word as a category title.

For example, imagine a book named "Fantasy", placed in folder "MyBooks/Fantasy/Author_X/Fantasy". When using folders, it's visible that the first "Fantasy" is the name of category, and the second one a name of the book. When using tags, I don't see how this can be clear - as there's only one possible "Fantasy" tag in a book.

Now, if you want to get to your "Fantasy" book, - will it be fine, if the reader shows you all boks in fantasy category as the result of the search?

[misstexas2]

I would really like to see folders. I'd love to be able to keep fiction separated from non-fiction and sci-fi separated from books that I might really read . (Just kidding) But I can't imagine not wanting to sort books that way. A lot of the books I have on my Kindle I may have no idea what they're about and sorting them to folders would save me from having to look each book up before starting a new one.

[ChaseKR]

The idea of having as many as 1,200 books without any form of categorization is preposterous.

[desertgrandma]

Originally Posted by ChaseKR

The idea of having as many as 1,200 books without any form of categorization is preposterous.

Well, you can sort by author, title, or most recently downloaded.

Theres 3 catagories right there........I'm just sayin'..........

[Dmsavage]

Okay - I just bought a Sony Reader last weekend after falling in love with the (first) Kindle 2 that I have seen. I was at my local Borders on the verge of buying the Sony and the guy at the next table had a Kindle 2 and it was slick. I almost changed my mind and bought a Kindle. The only problem is that I would like to get rid of a lot of my dead trees, and carry the library around with me. No categories (collections) was the show-stopper. On Monday they came out with the iphone Kindle and that will satisfy my Amazon habit for a while.

I still really like the Kindle and would like to have one. The tags idea is good. All that wonderful memory in the Kindle 2 is begging for organization.

[girlzilla]

Folders are needed for obvious reasons. I think all serious readers have "little librarians" inside us saying This goes here, this goes here.... Just look at Goodreads.com where it's all about dropping your books into useful categories. I also think it's a major flaw books cannot be grouped on the Kindle into series, too. Nothing worse than realizing you were reading a sequel when you thought it was book 1. I hope Amazon fixes this, and quickly. What's the point of mass amounts of data with no efficient ability to manage it?!

[dsuden]

Originally Posted by nelamvr6

Have you tried this:

Move the cursor to the top, move the joystick to the right, select title.

Then type a "D" on the keyboard. You will be prompted to click to go to the start of the "D" titles.

This functions similarly when you listed is sorted by author.

In short, even if you have hundreds of titles, you will be able to arrive at the title you're looking for in seconds...

Somehow in reading the manual I had missed that, and it's the solution to what had been my biggest frustration with the K2. I was typing more than one letter when searching for titles, and it was taking me into a body-text search that yielded too many results. By typing just one letter, it lets you jump alphabetically to the title (or author). Whew. Now I can load up my K2 collection and still manage to find my way around.

I do agree about the folder thing though. Folders (or collections) would be a great feature for those of us who like to organize our books various ways. Smart folders would be especially cool, since books sometimes fit into multiple categories depending on how they're tagged.

But for now, just being able to jump alphabetically is a big help. Thanks much.

[BobLenx]

I have a Sony-505 and a Kindle-2 - love them both. But for me the huge 1.2GB of storage space on my Kindle-2 is a ludicrous waste of space. I keep maybe 20 items in my Kindle-2 due to the lack of folders- whereas my Sony-505 has about 100 items right now since I can organize it and make it manageable.

Who on earth can possibly remember the names or authors of all 1,200 eBooks on their Kindle to do the first letter search? Gimme a break! FOLDERS and/or TAGS - come on Amazon wake up to reality. Let me search by folders/tags for science fiction, fantasy, mystery, poetry, biography, history, etc.

This fantastic device can hold roughly the equivalent of 10-12 bookcases six feet high and three feet wide. But you can only see 10 items on a screen at once - so that would take 120 screens. Insanity!

Folders and/or very sophisticated tags for the Kindle-2 - not only desireable but positively necessary. Only a total numbnut geek would put 1,200 books on a Kindle-2 and try to actually use it. Searching by title or author or most recently accessed does not cut it.

The only rationale I can come up with is that Amazon assumed we would all be buying eBooks from them and we would never acutally pay bucks for 1,200 books. But many of us download vast numbers of public domain free eBooks and would like to store them for future enjoyment. Mine are all stored on my laptop in organized folders for future access. But it would be a lot easier to have them all on my Kindle with folder/tag capability. Then again, what do they care? They already got our money for the device right?

I can guarantee you 100% that the digitial reader that eventually wins the overwhelming market share several years down the line with have organizational tools - folders AND tags. If Amazon does not want the Kindle line to be the ultimate winner in this race - too bad.

In my humble opinion the Kindle-2 without folders/tags could have been much less expensive to purchase if they only put in about 256MB. And without a way to organize that vast memory, that is all they should have installed and charged us for. God forbid the Kindle-3 comes out with 20GB and no oganizational tools - LOL!

Bob

[Daithi]

I want to have both tags and folders.

I think BOb makes a strong case for the benefits of having tags, so there is no reason for me to repeat them.

However, I'd still like folders. The reason why is that I find them easier to manage. I simply plug my Kindle into my PC and it looks like a hard drive. Managing folders is a simple as drag-and-drop. I can also do things like select the first file in a directory and then press Shift-Click to select another file and all the files in between are also selected. You can use Ctrl-Click to select multiple items as well.

With Tags, most software requires that I add the tag to each individual file. I still have a ton of music files on my phone that don't have a consistant genre because I can't make the time to go fix all the files. I'm afraid that I'd have the same problem with my books and my Kindle. Then again, this is all just software, so a convient means to 'tag' multiple files is certainly possible.

Anyway, 'dems my thoughts.

[AnemicOak]

Originally Posted by Daithi

I want to have both tags and folders.

Sounds like the best solution.

[emellaich]

Originally Posted by Daithi

I want to have both tags and folders.

{snip}

With Tags, most software requires that I add the tag to each individual file. I still have a ton of music files on my phone that don't have a consistant genre because I can't make the time to go fix all the files. I'm afraid that I'd have the same problem with my books and my Kindle. Then again, this is all just software, so a convient means to 'tag' multiple files is certainly possible.

Anyway, 'dems my thoughts.

I agree that both is best. But as a first step, there may be a tagging capability coming to Kindle non-drm books through Calibre 0.6:
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=46082

And, using calibre you don't have to add tags one at a time. You can select a group of books and make a bulk change to the metadata.

[crashingdoors]

Hopefully we see folders soon. I mainly only have public domain books now, and my total book count is around 50. Not much. But I'm neurotic about organizing and, right now, the fact that I can't put my small amount of books into folders is a little bit annoying. I only have 5 pages to go through but I can imagine when I have lots more, it'll be just annoying--not that I'm lazy, it's just a personal trait that I hate when I can't organize things the way that I want them organized.

I realize that not everyone does things the same, and maybe there aren't enough Kindle users who care to have folders (although I highly doubt this) but it'd be nice to have at least some alternative organization method available. The current system isn't all that bad, it's just not exactly what I have in mind.

[kilofox]

I am a long time Gmail user... so for me, since I use Gmail's Labels extensively, I am pro Tags because of their flexability. With Tags, a book can "be" in more than one "place" at the same time. i.e I can have the same title in "Fiction" and "Westerns". You cant do that with Folders. The Folders paradigm is, to me, a throwback to MS DOS....

Tags please.... Folders? Meh.......

[wilsonwong]

A 2 Kindles owner wants to have folder to manage the books. Hope they will listen.