Which collections/shelves do you have?

[lordofazeroth]

Hi.

I am currently transferring books to my kindle, including collections - all with calibre.

But I am struggling a bit with the collections, in some collections I have a massive amount of books.

How do you organise your books?
Which collections/shelves do you have?

[Ripplinger]

I didn't think you could set up Collections on Kindles with Calibre (unless you managed to have installed the hacks at least on an older firmware, but didn't think there's any way to do it on any newer Kindle)? Anyway, I have about 40 genres, and any series, all as Collections. I keep under 600 books on my reader though, so even for the larger Collections, it's manageable for me.

[theducks]

I use the Kindle Collections PI to set some collections by Series
I also use the Calibre Plugboard to pre-pend the Series_index to the title

That is it
I read Fiction. I know what genre my authors mostly write, so no need there

[issybird]

I have lots of categories/shelves, but they're largely germane to me, I suspect.

I'd back into it. Look at your biggest collections and try to think of ways to subdivide them, until you get each category down to whatever you think is a reasonable number. I like mine large enough to allow for browsing, but small enough that I've targeted what I want and don't have to skim through several pages of listings.

[pwalker8]

Calibre is nice in that a specific book can be in multiple collections. I generally use the basic category collection system, for example, a book on World War II would be in the World War II collection, as well as the History collection. I also have a few basic purpose collections, such as reading, to be read, favorites and a few others. So that same WW II book might also be in the reading or to be read collection.

[latepaul]

I don't use collections any more. Even with calibre plugins too much hassle to maintain. If I'm looking for something I can't find with just browsing, I do a search.

[MGlitch]

Genre and series, though I'm a heavy Fantasy reader, with only a few variances in my ebook collection. So I have a lot of sub-genre collections like high fantasy, epic fantasy, sword and sorcery fantasy, urban fantasy, military fantasy, dark fantasy, etc.

[Cinisajoy]

Originally Posted by lordofazeroth

Hi.

I am currently transferring books to my kindle, including collections - all with calibre.

But I am struggling a bit with the collections, in some collections I have a massive amount of books.

How do you organise your books?
Which collections/shelves do you have?

Hi and good luck.

I gave up on keeping mine organized.

[AnemicOak]

I pretty much stopped bothering with collections three or four years ago. The only collection I use anymore is a Read collection where I add books once I've finished them. I find it much easier to just search my device by author, title or series when I'm looking for a book than having "pages" of collections to look through.

[meeera]

I doubt my collections would be applicable to most other people. I have one for short fiction zines, one for books by Australian women writers, one for Australian YA, a couple for long series I'm in the middle of, one for netgalley books, a few for awards whose nominees I like to try to read, a couple for books I'd like to read soon...

[Sweetpea]

I never understood the need for collections, except a collection of series. And a collection of reading status (unread, reading and red).

I only haven't been able yet to incorporate the series well on my H2O, though...

[HarryT]

I don't use collections. I organise series using a Calibre plugboard to prefix the book title with the series name and number, which works just fine for me. I end up with, for example:

Miss Marple 01 - The Murder at the Vicarage
Miss Marple 02 - The Thirteen Problems

etc.

So when I have been sorted by author, and by title within author, on my Kindle, I see all my series in the correct order, which is all I need.

[GeoffR]

I mainly read fiction and I haven't found any real use for collections yet. Maybe if I read a lot of non-fiction I would want to create collections by subject.

In my mind I think of fiction books mainly by author, then series, and in some cases it is useful to seperate read and unread. But there is no need to create collections because I can just search for an author or series and get a list of all books by that author or in that series, and I can filter by read and unread. Searching usually only requires typing in 2-3 letters before the author or series appears in the pick list, so I think it is just as fast as accessing a collection.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by GeoffR

I mainly read fiction and I haven't found any real use for collections yet. Maybe if I read a lot of non-fiction I would want to create collections by subject.

In my mind I think of fiction books mainly by author, then series, and in some cases it is useful to seperate read and unread. But there is no need to create collections because I can just search for an author or series and get a list of all books by that author or in that series, and I can filter by read and unread. Searching usually only requires typing in 2-3 letters before the author or series appears in the pick list, so I think it is just as fast as accessing a collection.

You still need some method of seeing the series, though, in order to be able to search for it, so you need to use something like a plugboard to append it to the title. Series information is not a part of a book's metadata.

[GeoffR]

Originally Posted by HarryT

You still need some method of seeing the series, though, in order to be able to search for it, so you need to use something like a plugboard to append it to the title. Series information is not a part of a book's metadata.

The series is part of the metadata on Kobo devices, so it is not necessary to append it to the title or author fields. When I do a book search, it looks at the author, series, title, and subtitle fields.

Edit: I should note that adding the series to the title is needed in order to sort by series, but not to search. I would prefer to be able to sort by series too, but I don't want to add the series to the title because that causes the title to appear multiple times in the pick list when searching by series.