I’ve had Kindle e-readers, and recently I tried using Moonreader on a Kindle Fire (I don’t much like reading on that screen). I’ve been a bit frustrated by grouping books in the past. For example, when making a group with all the books in a series, or all the books by one author, I have to sort through all the books in my e-reader and add only the books I want to the list one at a time. This is time-consuming, and I have to do it every time I buy a new e-reader. I’m looking to replace my missing Paperwhite (probably with another Paperwhite, though a Kobo is a possibility) when my stimulus check comes in, so this onerous task is on my mind now.
For this example, let’s say I want to make a list of Charles Dickens novels. I have navigate through my Paperwhite and select them, one at time. It would be easier to drag all the books into a Charles Dickens subfolder when transferring them from my computer. Or, say I want to make a list of all of Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, in order. I’d like to do the same thing, upload them all to one folder and be done with the tedium of selecting 60 stories from among all the others.
Do any e-readers allow such organizing? Does any e-reader allow a full backup, so that if it goes haywire and it needs a factory reset, or if it needs replaced, you can just upload it and not have to do all this all over again?
Alternately, is there an easier way to do things that I’m overlooking, from within the Paperwhite itself? I don’t have an e-reader right now, so I’m only going by what I did in the past - I can’t go though and see if I overlooked something at this time.
I took a lot of time to set up my e-reader, to organize my books for quick and convenient access, and as much as I want to replace it, I’m not looking forward to doing that yet again.
The only dedicated e-readers I have had were from a discontinued line (made by Sony) so I can’t tell you about current e-readers, but if you aren’t already archiving all your files on your computer, you really should. And you need Calibre if you don’t already have it. It will sort your books into folders by author (and maybe by some other criterion if you tell it to, I don’t know, I’ve never tried.) then you drag and drop the folders into your reader.
Archiving the BOOKS aren’t a problem, I’d like to archive the whole of my e-reader, so that all books, and all lists, are saved and can be restored.
I’ve used Calibre for many years, but only to transfer books to my e-reader. I did not notice a function to transfer folders over. Does that then group the books within into a list, such as I described in my OP?
Also, I found calibre annoying. When I let it have its way with my books, it added numbers to folder names and filenames. When I worked to name the files as I liked them that wasn’t something I wanted.
Kindle’s “Collections” used to be local, but it’s now managed on the server and should propagate to all your Kindle devices.
Go to the Amazon web site on your computer, and go to Account/Lists -> Your Account -> Your Content and Devices. This should show you all the Kindle books you own. Notice there is a “Collections” column - that shows how many collections each book is in. (Collections are not folders, they are more like playlists, in that each book can be part of multiple Collections, but this should still work for your purposes.) If there is a non-zero number there, you can click on the number to see the list of Collections it’s in.
If you see all zeros on that column, it may be that your Kindle was still using local Collections. You should be able to create Collections on the web and sync them though. Just use the check boxes to select the books you want to group together, and click on the “Add to collections” button.
I guess that won’t work if you make heavy use of public domain books not obtained through Amazon, like the ones I linked to in my OP. Thanks anyway, and thanks for providing the term, “Collection”, which was escaping me.
Maybe you should consider one of the Android-based e-Ink tablets, like the Onyx Boox series. They have standard filesystems so you can copy whole folder structures from your computer. However, their access to Kindle books is poor and uncertain.
I know of no e-readers that organize books themselves. Furthermore they don’t use Windows so the folders you can see on your computer are essentially meaningless.
Calibre, annoying or not, can automatically set up “shelves” but this does require downloading plugins and doing some work behind the scenes. Fortunately Calibre supporters have pages telling you how to do this.
Calibre can actually “back up” books in one place. Unfortunately it’s too large for any of my free online storage options so I store them in my external hard drive.
It works if you upload your public domain books to your amazon account. I often download books from gutenberg.org and send the files to my amazon account by mailing them as attachments. The destination email address can be set in your amazon account, for me it’s xyz@kindle.com, where “xyz” is the same as the email address my amazon account is associated with.
When you organize your books in collections on your kindle device and then synchronize, the books and the collections will be synched with your contents in your amazon account.
An interesting option I wasn’t familiar with, thanks for pointing this out.
Thanks to everyone. I’ll look into Calibre plugins, something I’ve never tried - I’ve only used the base program. That may provide some improvements. I’ll read up on it more, thanks, and I’ll also look into uploading the PD books to my account.
I have a nine year old Kobo reader. It used to be that my library was alphabetic and if you wanted to get to Zelazny you had to scroll through the whole damn thing (and scrolling was a nuisance because if you went even a little way into the screen, it would open the book you happened to hit and you had to start over). After a recent firmware upgrade you can now get a list of authors and scroll through that and when you hit Zelazny you tap on that and get a list of all his works you own. If you don’t choose authors (you get that choice of how to list every time), it seems to list them by most recently purchased. If I replace it (it has recently stopped adjusting the backlighting in accordance with the ambient lighting, so I might), I would like to get one just like it. It is called the Kobo Arc.
I second the suggestion to use Calibre. It’s a good way to make backups of your ebooks to your computer. You can have it tell you which books are on the computer that are not on the device and vice versa. You can standardize authors, e.g. “J.R.R. Tolkein” versus “Tolkein, J.R.R.”. You can list books as being part of a series (and you can insert books in the middle, e.g. this is book 1, this is 2, this is one the author shoved in later so it’s 1.5).
You can convert formats to read on different devices. This doesn’t typically work on DRM’ed books but works nicely on books that do not currently have DRM.
What you describe in the OP, however… to the best of my knowledge there’s no good way of doing that on the device. I suppose you could manually drag the folders (from Calibre) onto the device using Windows Explorer and go to “my files” (or whatever) on the device, but I have never tried this and I have no clue how smoothly that would work on the device. I understand your frustration though - I’d love to be able to, say, group books into various genres / folders (and add books to multiple folders as appropriate) but there doesn’t seem to be a smooth way of doing it.
Once you have your books on the computer, Calibre can really help - it’s pretty intuitive. Amazon has made it much tougher to sideload a book from the device into Calibre, as they’ve switched their download format (to KFX vs AZW) but at the moment, at least, you can get past that by using Amazon’s web page and manually downloading it per this site. At that point, you can import the book into Calibre - and assuming it’s DRM free, you can convert it to other formats. I’m guessing that the Onyx works with epub or similar formats vs AZW.
Once it’s on the computer and converted, you can either use Calibre to transfer, or use Windows Explorer.
If the book has DRM, and you are in the US, it’s arguably illegal to remove the DRM in order to allow you to do such transformation. I think Calibre can still manage the book in terms of moving it around etc, but you won’t be able to convert to a different format, and if the Onyx can’t read the DRM’ed format, then this won’t help you. There are ways around it if you google - but again, questionably legal and I won’t say anything more on that topic.
Same thing with Barnes and Noble-purchased ebooks. B&N has really made it hard to sideload books; they used to have a link on their website to manually download. Most recently though, I’ve had to load the desktop app to my Windows computer (and I think I had to use an older version of the software at that), at which point I could get a book downloaded such that Calibre could handle it.