Permanently deleting about 1,000 Indie titles...how about you?

[graycyn]

Originally Posted by QuantumIguana

If I bought a book, I want the option of being able to read it again, even if I don't read it again. Perhaps Amazon could have a "deep archive", where you can put books that you are less likely to read again. The longer people have e-readers, the more unwieldy Amazon's archive system will be. There needs to be better ways to organize and navigate it.

Yes, I usually put some thought in before actually purchasing a book. I generally only spend the money if I feel it is likely I'll want to read or reference the book again. One thing I like is that I can keep a book without it taking up physical space. In years past, I often sold books that now I wish I had kept. At the time, I may have felt I'd read them enough, and that I needed the space for newer purchases, but some have since become hard to find.

[wodin]

Twice in the last several months, I clicked the "One Click" button only to have Amazon tell me “You have already bought that one”.

I am of the age that memory fails me as to when I bought or even read something, and I can happily read it again; for FREE! As a matter of fact, it just happened yesterday. I started Kim Harrison’s “The Hollows” series, and when I got to the fourth book, it was FREE!

I'm half way through da buggah, and I have no idea if I've read it before or not.

[soulfuldog]

@ Wodin. Unfortunately I don't have age as that excuse and I am forever clicking on books on Amazon only to be told I've already got it, and I've lost count of the number of books I've started to read, slowly begin to *think* I might have read it before but carry on to the end because if I have, I can't remember what happens anyway!

I do however have an occasional clear out of free Amazon books that I've read. So there is always the danger that I'd download one I've previously deleted from the archive.....

I used to download a lot of free books, but I'm far more selective now. But I do read just as many free books by new, indie authors as I do books I've bought, so I do hope to get through them all eventually. The only difference is that if I'm not enjoying one of them, I'll just stop reading it and move onto something else, that's something I never used to do.

[Apache]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

I'd rather ebook stores had every single book ever written and allow me to be the final arbiter of what's "good." Quite frankly; I value my dim-witted second cousin's opinion on a book's quality much more than I do New York's, right now.

So funny and so true.
Apache

[Dr. Drib]

Originally Posted by Ralph Sir Edward

Don,

Don't let it worry you. It's only electrons...

I first went through this problem when I had paper books and only had so much space to store books in. I would cull the paper books and sell them used. I don't get too many freebie books, but I have around 1400 books on my library. There's around 100 more titles I would like to add, if I could buy decent e-book versions.

We were reared to believe that books were the finest flower of civilization (true), and that they were scarce. They aren't scarce any more. So don't worry about deleting those you don't want, either somebody else will save them (for whatever reason), or they weren't worth saving.

RSE (Cabell fan)

So true....but James Branch Cabell is certainly worth keeping in hardcover!




Don

[Fbone]

I did remove quite a few titles from my Goodreads' TBR list recently. Some no longer interested me or were not as I first thought. A few were over 1000 pages and life's too short. Ratings on a few fell precipitously and again life's too short.

I still have over 20 years of material left in my TBR pile.

[shootingMaNs]

Originally Posted by Dr. Drib

I have over 2,400 titles on my account from Amazon and was thinking of permanently deleting around 1,000 or so titles.

Most of those titles are ebooks I now figure I will never read and now have no intention of ever reading them - although at the time I thought I would. I realize now here are just way too many better books and authors to read. (At the time, they were all freebies and I snatched them up like a zombie in search of brains, my acquisitional lust all-consuming.)

Permanently deleting about 1,000 will still leave me with around 1400 or so titles.

Anyone else going through this kind of situation, where you just want to make your ebook life a little easier to manage?


Don

I started doing the same thing for the same reason, but it's only a couple hundred ebooks for me. I had a bunch of freebies I downloaded and never got around to reading. Most of them have lost whatever appeal they had for me at the time I downloaded them, so it wasn't very difficult for me to delete them.

[cromag]

I don't deal with Amazon very often. I do, occasionally, clear some unread ebooks out of my computer, but only after I burn them to CD. I never know exactly what I might be in the mood to read at any time in the future, and sometimes I like to re-read a book.

[caleb72]

Rather than looking at what to delete, I'm more looking towards maybe not picking 5 or 6 freebies a day.

It's not only the piling up of ebooks that I'm never going to read, it's the way I obsessively download, liberate, classify, change covers etc.. Downloading freebies is taking up time - a commodity which is comparatively more valuable than these ebooks at full price.

I was starting to think that maybe I should only pick up freebies if they were actually discounted from a significantly higher price or already on my wish list - or something. Break the cycle and spend more time reading, writing reviews, doing housework, writing music, working on my crochet, or spending time with the S.O.

[Greg Anos]

Originally Posted by Dr. Drib

So true....but James Branch Cabell is certainly worth keeping in hardcover!




Don

But with a e-book copy, I can carry them wherever I go....

[Dr. Drib]

Originally Posted by Ralph Sir Edward

But with a e-book copy, I can carry them wherever I go....

OT:

I have all that are available on ebook, but the Kalki editions are not the definitive ones, as you know; and, those are the only ones (that I know of, anyway) that have been transferred to ebook. That's the reason I'm keeping my complete Storisende edition of James Branch Cabell's Works.

Well, actually, I'm keeping all of my James Branch Cabell.

By the way, I have an almost complete set of Kalki (the magazine edited by James Blish.)




Don

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by susan_cassidy

Samples are not kept in your Amazon account, only on your device/app. I don't know how Nook does it.

I did have a couple of library eBooks I needed to get rid of.

B&N keep the samples in your library which is good in case you do want them again or to remind you of those specific eBooks.

[BearMountainBooks]

For those of you who want to "keep" the books but "delete" them, you can go to Amazon's Media Library:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/ays/secure...w=_cat_agg_all

Login to your amazon account there and you will see a listing of all your ebooks purchased from Amazon (including downloaded freebies).

Select items (checkbox) and then select "move to trash." Move to trash is not a permanent deletion. It's just a large garbage can where you can "archive" items. THen when you are searching on your regular amazon kindle list you don't see these archived/trashed items. Yes, it is possible that someday Amazon could trash them, but it's been there for as long as I've been using it (couple of years now) and when you select trash it tells you can "untrash" them at any time.

So you can basically store a bunch of the stuff you don't want to sort through all the time. I have a LOT of the books I've read in this bin. They aren't on my Kindle or in my list (the other list Amazon lets you use --the normal Kindle list).

SOmeone else may have posted about this; sorry I only read the first page.

And I agree with the people who say it isn't indie versus other. It's just good books versus ones I've tried and am not likely to try again or ones I've read and won't read again. I've found some gems that were free (astoundingly good) and I've found some stinkers.

[fratermus]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

I've always found it ridiculous to have thousands and thousands of free (or pirated) ebooks in Calibre. You can't read all that. Even at a rate of one book per day, it'll take you around 3 years to read 1000 books. What's the point of having 10K books? It'll take at least 30 years to read them, probably much longer.

Even in this digital age is not uncommon for files to go offline for whatever reason and have to be resurrected from someone's personal archive. This happens over an over in the various hobby-related communities where I participate. Servers crash, companies retract/redact information, etc.

We're still stung by the loss of the library at Alexandria. What if someone had paid copyists to [re-]duplicate every incoming resource there and stored it in their cellar version of Calibre? Even if he couldn't personally read them all we in the present would be grateful to have his collection.

What if Arab scholars and (to a lesser extent) Irish monks not effected the so-called Transmission of the Classics?

What if a lone copy of Frontinus' treatise on the workings of the water supply in Rome not been rediscovered hiding in a library, facilitating the repopulation of the city and the relocation of the locus of re-nascent culture from Firenze to Roma?

I'm not saying that every .mobi or .azw file is a candidate for future greatness, but it might just be something that someone needs.

[tubemonkey]

I don't care if I ever read all of the books I add. What I read depends on the mood I'm in.