Amazon is Making it Difficult...

[Rellwood]

It seems that they just want to keep tweaking their site to prevent users from managing their content and to prevent people from seeing the books that there are to get.

1. They have changed their content & devices page from an easily scrapable 200 book per page list to 25 books per page with dropdowns and covers, lots of new things to do with each book, but you cant really do much in bulk since you can't see more than 25 books at a time. Basically they added covers (not bad if you have a small-ish library, but if you are like me and have purchased over 1000 books, you really can't scroll. If you try and scrape the site and put it in excell it's impossible because of all the drop downs, etc.

2. If you send to your Kindle they have done the same thing with that book list as where they put the covers in the list - but since they don't show the covers - it's just a bunch of blank covers taking up space in the list.

3. Adding books to a collection - impossible. They don't allow you to type in the name of the collection, you have to scroll down a list that is sorted randomly. Not helpful.

4. There is no way to sort the books in a collection - there is no discernable way to figure how they are sorted within the collection.

5. They stopped the rate/review section where you can mark - NOT INTERESTED

6. They stopped putting the book info in their emails when you purchase a new book - making it impossible to search emails for book info.

7. They stopped putting the author names in their book lists. Now it's just the title of the book and you have to look at the cover if you want to know the author. Not helpful for people who aren't looking at the website on their desktop where the covers are in color and larger.


Don't get me started on the Kindles and how they are now set up...

[Sirtel]

There is a simple way around some of those issues - don't use the Amazon site for anything. Download your Kindle purchases immediately after buying and manage them in Calibre. No need to visit MYK ever again.

As to the collections on Kindles, that's been an enormous PITA for many years. No way around that other than jailbreak or moving on to another brand.

[Quoth]

Download at once, but they removed that from purchase, so now you have to go to Content and Devices. A least the most recent is the top of the list.
Even deleting collections on site seems broken. So I import to calibre and read on a Kobo.
I only use the Kindles to test new styles in books we publish.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Quoth

Download at once, but they removed that from purchase, so now you have to go to Content and Devices. A least the most recent is the top of the list.
Even deleting collections on site seems broken. So I import to calibre and read on a Kobo.
I only use the Kindles to test new styles in books we publish.

But is that the same on Amazon US as things can be different between Amazon US and the rest of the second class Amazon sites.= (Amazon does treat non-US sites as second class).

[haertig]

I don't understand why people would want to use Amazon, or their Kindle, to manage a book collection. Talk about the wrong tool for the job. Amazon is where you purchase books. A Kindle is where you read them. Calibre is where you do everything else. At least IMHO that's making the most of each component in the chain.

[Kreatur3]

Originally Posted by haertig

I don't understand why people would want to use Amazon, or their Kindle, to manage a book collection. Talk about the wrong tool for the job. Amazon is where you purchase books. A Kindle is where you read them. Calibre is where you do everything else. At least IMHO that's making the most of each component in the chain.

Agreed! Sadly there isn't a collection manager that works for the new paperwhite yet. Patiently waiting! 😊

[tomsem]

The Manage Content page has been this way for awhile now. It's actually better than it used to be for many purposes (has more features).

As for Collection management, the best way might be to use one of the mobile apps (iOS or Android) to do this. You can select many books at once, the list is as long as your library, etc.

That said, the implementation does not scale up well for use cases like 'author' or 'genre' collections, and there is no way tag things with calibre and have Kindle do anything with this (short of jail breaking anyway).

It works okay if you have a relatively small number of Collections and apply these to a limited subset of books, e.g. 'Started', 'Read Next', 'Favorites' etc., which is how I use them.

One might want the ability to add Subject or Series info to the ebook metadata (or in some well-defined metadata companion file that you could edit) and have Kindle platform do something with it, but this feature does not exist.

Pocketbook allows browsing by Genre, Series, Author, and lets you browse by Folder as well, but I haven't explored mine enough to know how much control you have over that (i.e. how to leverage it for ebooks you side-load using Calibre). You can also create collections but it seems to me no better or worse than what Kindle platform does.

Personally I am not much for 'organizing' and have no issues with finding things using Search or Sort. I only use Collections to bring some focus to some of the books in my Kindle library, again, the ones I've started reading, and ones which I stumble over and want to give higher priority to when I'm finished with a book and am ready to start another. Grouping by Subject/Genre would have very little value to me, if it required me to come up with my own system.

It'd be kinda neat if something like a LoC or Dewey Decimal classification could be applied and you could browse things on your reading device (or online bookstore) the way you would in a physical library (as organized by professional librarians), but I've never seen that implemented for consumer oriented ebook reading platforms. I used to have favorite LoC/DD numbers that I would head for when visiting new libraries but am afraid those brain cells have been reassigned, as it has been many years since I've spent any time in a public or university library. At least for non-fiction subjects, it really helped browsing a physical library efficiently: I could walk into any library and quickly see what was available in my areas of interest with those magic codes.

[kacir]

Originally Posted by tomsem

Pocketbook allows browsing by Genre, Series, Author, and lets you browse by Folder as well, but I haven't explored mine enough to know how much control you have over that (i.e. how to leverage it for ebooks you side-load using Calibre).

I simply use "save to disk" function in Calibre to create hierarchical directories with books I wish to load to my older PocketBook. Then I use "create catalog" in Calibre to create a catalog of books I have just exported.
The catalog lists all authors, series, titles, blurbs all nicely hyperlinked so you can browse your books and when you decide what you want to read you find the file quickly in your hierarchical directories.

You could use "create catalog" also to create a catalog of books you wish to load up on the Kindle and use that to decide what book you wish to read next. When you know what you want, it should be much easier to navigate to the book, even with the atrocious UI Kindles have.

[tomsem]

Originally Posted by kacir

I simply use "save to disk" function in Calibre to create hierarchical directories with books I wish to load to my older PocketBook. Then I use "create catalog" in Calibre to create a catalog of books I have just exported.
The catalog lists all authors, series, titles, blurbs all nicely hyperlinked so you can browse your books and when you decide what you want to read you find the file quickly in your hierarchical directories.

You could use "create catalog" also to create a catalog of books you wish to load up on the Kindle and use that to decide what book you wish to read next. When you know what you want, it should be much easier to navigate to the book, even with the atrocious UI Kindles have.

Yes, I would rather be reading than organizing. I like knowing I could organize and catalog if I felt like it (having imported nearly all of my ebooks into calibre), and target any device of my choosing, but in the end I'm usually content to play the Kindle as it lays. Its UI does not bother me at all.

For example, I jailbroke an Oasis and tried KOReader and it is all too much tweaking, customizations and kitchen sink-ness. For me, it is too busy, and got in the way. I undid the jailbreak. I still have KOReader on my Pocketbook, just for reference I suppose, but I prefer the Era UI.

[Rellwood]

Originally Posted by Sirtel

There is a simple way around some of those issues - don't use the Amazon site for anything. Download your Kindle purchases immediately after buying and manage them in Calibre. No need to visit MYK ever again.

As to the collections on Kindles, that's been an enormous PITA for many years. No way around that other than jailbreak or moving on to another brand.

I wish. I use Kindle Unlimited and Overdrive. Plus...I like to sync them between devices and have Goodreads keep track of read dates. I am unfortunatly stuck. I DO have Calibre and have every book I have ever owned (and borrowed) on my computer. I just stopped side-loading ages ago when I got tired of trying to make all my devices sync.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Rellwood

I wish. I use Kindle Unlimited and Overdrive. Plus...I like to sync them between devices and have Goodreads keep track of read dates. I am unfortunatly stuck. I DO have Calibre and have every book I have ever owned (and borrowed) on my computer. I just stopped side-loading ages ago when I got tired of trying to make all my devices sync.

You say you stopped syncing and yet in another recent thread, you are trying to sync. Which is it?

[jhowell]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

You say you stopped syncing and yet in another recent thread, you are trying to sync. Which is it?

Rellwood wrote “stopped side-loading” not “stopped syncing”. Side loading via USB prevents syncing.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by jhowell

Rellwood wrote “stopped side-loading” not “stopped syncing”. Side loading via USB prevents syncing.

What I read was "I got tired of trying to make all my devices sync".

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

What I read was "I got tired of trying to make all my devices sync".

Perhaps reading the whole sentence might have helped?

I just stopped side-loading ages ago when I got tired of trying to make all my devices sync.

Though I will admit to feeling some questions about another sentence:

I DO have Calibre and have every book I have ever owned (and borrowed) on my computer.

To me, keeping borrowed books past their return date or in the case of KU, past the date you returned the book on Amazon so you no longer have any rights to the book is, basically, just piracy.

[John F]

Originally Posted by DNSB

...

To me, keeping borrowed books past their return date or in the case of KU, past the date you returned the book on Amazon so you no longer have any rights to the book is, basically, just piracy.

Amazon does seem to handle this well vs ADE. Seems like with ADE a lot of people who use ADE for library borrowing are pirates, seeing as how there is a copy of the book on your computer after you have returned it.