Do you organize your Kindle books? Yes, I did ask this six years ago, and I am asking again.
I feel like I have such an enormous influx of books and samples I never manage to keep up with categorizing the stuff. Do you have a simple system that works? Please share!
I’ve been reading Kindle books since 2012, and I organize them very simply - when they’ve been read, they get moved into the “been read” folder. Otherwise they stay at the top of my Kindle until I read them. It’s worked for me for well over 500 books.
Yes. It’s one of my hobbies 
. I have my view set to collections, with all my collections sorted alphabetically. I also set it to cover view, not list. If I have more than four books by a particular author, they get their own collection. They all start with either Fiction or Reality (I don’t like the look of Non-fiction), then a dash, then the last name of the author. If I happen to have collections for two authors with the same last name, I use a comma and the first initial. For those authors for which I have less than four books, I have collections listed by genre, such as Fiction - Horror, or Reality - Cookbooks. Within each collection, I tend to put an author’s multi-book epic at the top if they have one, followed by their other books by publication date. With Stephen King, for example, I have the eight Dark Tower books at the top, then his other books in order of publication. Occasionally I’ll place a book out of order if that makes sense. For Stephen King’s Wind Through the Keyhole, for example, I placed it in between books 4 and 5, since chronologically it’s book 4.5 even though it’s the most recentIy published Dark Tower book. For those books in a collection that is sorted by genre, I alphabetize them by the author’s last name.
Because of this preference, I purchased a Boox e-reader. I’m still not sure why Amazon decided to let people using the Kindle app to organize individual books, but with an actual Kindle device you can only sort by certain criteria like most recently read or by title. That’s my biggest complaint about the actual Kindle devices.
ETA. For what it’s worth, it was Sue Grafton’s alphabet series that triggered me to make the change away from a Kindle device. The metadata for A is for Alibi is set to I, A for Alibi in Amazon’s database. No matter what I tried, I couldn’t move the book to appear first. It stayed stuck between I is for Innocent and J is for Judgement no matter what I tried, until I used the Kindle app on my Boox device. That made the task easy.
I have my Kindle books in different collections by subject (and fiction books separated by whether they’re contemporary or older, since I have a lot of pre-1923 books). There’s a separate collection for library books, and I finally broke down and made a “Read” one so that I’m not wading through them trying to find an unread book. The books are sorted alphabetically by author within the collections.
I’m not sure how well it really works, and it annoys me that I can’t sort each collection in the way I want that one. For instance, I want my library books in descending order from when I added them so I’m likely to open the oldest one first, but it makes no sense to me to sort the other collections that way.
Some by author surname, some by more general category. I frequently go on a re-reading “kick” of some individual author’s works, so it makes sense to have them in a collection of their own.
My Kindle reflects my naturally disorganized nature. Initially it had one book on it. Then it had two. Now it has well over 400, and I still get by with books ordered by “recently read/latest”, and using search to find others.
The Kindle app lets you sort individual books. When you’re in a collection, there’s a pencil icon at the top. When you press that you can then click and drag individual books wherever you want to place them. Unfortunately this only works on non-Kindle devices using the Kindle app. The actual Kindle itself lacks this feature. I’m not sure why Amazon would break their own hardware that way, but that’s what they did.
Does it sync the way collections are organized between the Kindle app and the Kindle device?
My eyes are so wide right now. I’ve known about things like filtering by samples or books, and organizing by Recently Read or Title. But I didn’t know you could create collections, and now I kind of want to devote a good three hours of my weekend to making collections!
I keep all my books in Calibre, and use the embedded metadata to sort however I feel at a particular moment. I then send those books to my Kindle in one unorganized lump. I try to keep no more than a couple dozen books on my Kindle at a time so I can get by with the “Recent” view only. I find the slow refresh time of the Kindle to be massively irritating so I anything that involves changing views or sorting to be not worth the effort. I just live with what’s on top and only occasionally scroll past the first longing page of my books.
I don’t know. The changes I make sync between my iPhone and Boox, but I don’t have a Kindle to test it out on.
TIL that some people organize their kindle books.
I keep the books in Calibre, converted to .mobi. On the Kindle I have them sorted by author name, and Calibre name books in the same series as Title;series number. It works well for me.
Collections. Lots of collections. In alphabetical order. I have “00 In Progress,” “01 To Read,” and “02 Samples” collections at the top, then one for every author I’ve read 2+ books from (by last name). Other collections include a generic “ZZ Other Read” collection for most of the rest, with a “Finish Later” collection for books that I started and didn’t dislike but couldn’t get through the first time and a “ZZ Abandoned” collection for books that I started but didn’t like enough to finish.
Four collections:
Current (2 items) - For books I’m currently reading
Samples (351) - I only buy the book when I’m about to read it
Read (244) - This is only what’s on the device - older books that I’m not likely to read again are archived
Unread (18) - Free books, so no need to sample, or books I started and didn’t finish; a few self-help books I’m working through
I get so many of my Kindle books from the library that I don’t bother (I usually get 4 or 5 books at a time, and I’m usually on the last one when they expire). The books that I have bought I only keep in the cloud, probably in date order, because I rarely re-read a book.
I have answered this question. At least on Android, any collections created in the app sync to the device.
I now have sorted all 400 of my Kindle books into 24 collections.
I wanted to point out for those who don’t know that you can now automatically sort books by samples, Read and Unread without making special collections. This makes it convenient to see what you have left to read and to delete unwanted samples.
For me overwhelmingly I have more unread books than read.
I have tried to get library books from Libby but they never have a Kindle version of what I want. I have weird tastes, maybe. I know they’re not going to have the latest science fiction romance. But I would have thought The Count of Monte Cristo and any Agatha Christie book would be a part of their library.
That must vary by your library. Libby at my library has four versions of Count of Monte Cristo in Kindle, and 107 Agatha Christie books.
There are two formats in Libby that seem to have more titles than Kindle: Overdrive Read, and EPUB books. I don’t know what either of those are, I should probably research it to find out if I can use either of those formats.
Thank you for conducting the experiment 
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