Question about Calibre->Kindle capabilities

[kaufman]

After a string of Kindles, I switched to a Kobo last year. I also discovered the real power of Calibre, and have made that the hub for all of my ebook storage/transfer/etc.

When using a Kobo, you can use Calibre and plugins to copy the books as well as to create collections in order to organize them.

I plan to switch back to the Kindle hardware next month, and I was wondering if any of those same organizational capabilities are working on the Kindle.

I know you can side load books, but can you group books into collections? Order them in series? Anything like that?

Thanks for the help.

[kovidgoyal]

Not without jailbreaking your kindle. See the Kindle Collections plugin thread.

[kaufman]

Oh well. Thanks for the info.

[eschwartz]

Kindle Collections plugin

I would suggest using the Kindle Touch or a PW running firmware<5.4.2 -- that is when Amazon disabled the ability of Collections Manager (kindlet) to create nested/hierarchical collections. Very cool BTW.

All really easy to use.

[kaufman]

Thanks, but I think I would rather have the Voyage than collections.

[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by kaufman

Thanks, but I think I would rather have the Voyage than collections.

Voyage seems way too overpriced for little concrete value, but let's not get into that here.

I don't know if/when it will be jailbroken, the current jailbreak requires fw<5.4.5 to install itself (preserved through updates). But if/when it does (and there is no way Amazon can keep the team out forever), LibrarianSync should work with collections just fine. And Collections Manager can just as easily get another patch for newer firmware.

On the calibre end, you just need the plugin to export a list of collections.

To be clear: Firmware >= 5.4.2 does support collections (by modifying the collections database according to the device schema) but 5.4.2 removed a legacy loophole that allowed nesting them via a hack.

[kaufman]

The voyage seems perfect for me, but that just me. Sure I would prefer it was less, but if I use it an average of 3 hours a day for the next 2 years, it's really not that much for the pleasure it will give me.

Getting back to the topic at hand. Are you saying that I can do some combining into collections without jailbreaking? Just not nested collections? Or I can't do anything without jailbreaking first?

[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by kaufman

The voyage seems perfect for me, but that just me. Sure I would prefer it was less, but if I use it an average of 3 hours a day for the next 2 years, it's really not that much for the pleasure it will give me.

Getting back to the topic at hand. Are you saying that I can do some combining into collections without jailbreaking? Just not nested collections? Or I can't do anything without jailbreaking first?

Jailbreaking is a requirement.

You need to jailbreak in order to run one of the two tools which will edit the collections database in the system partition. Obviously, everything would be easier if more than the userstore was exported over USB. Or the collections database was in the userstore.

Anyway, more detail in the plugin thread (links to both tools).