organizing ebooks on Kindle Fire
June 12, 2013 1:48 PM   Subscribe

How do you all organize your ebooks?

My Kindle Fire is pretty amazing, but for one thing -- I can't seem to organize my books and PDFs by genre. Ideally, I'd like to have the texts associated with my job (including the PDFs) grouped together (and perhaps with titles readable via list?). I'd also like to make my fun stuff "disappear" from view while I'm working so I don't get distracted. It'd be nice if whatever app did this worked like Nanny for Chrome -- just POOF! It's 9AM, no more vampires for you!

FreeTime (the thing for kids) helps with this, but it doesn't retain bookmarks or notes very well, so I can't go from reading and taking notes on my Kindle to writing from those notes on my laptop very effectively. Also it doesn't actually keep your books organized by title or whatever -- just by the last time you opened them. :(

Any suggestions? Or am I somehow Kindling wrong?
posted by spunweb to Technology (7 answers total) 9 users marked this as a favorite
 
Calibre will allow you to tag your ebooks however you'd like, and you can filter your view by excluding certain tags. I'm not sure whether the Kindle Fire recognizes those tags/categories, though.
posted by asperity at 2:32 PM on June 12, 2013 [1 favorite]


Hmm. I can make categories on my Kindle paperwhite - so, fiction, non-fiction, genre X, genre Y, etc. If I press the title of a book, I get an option to move it to a category; to make a new one, there's an option under the menu. Do these not exist in the Fire?

If I had a Windows machine, there's apparently a plugin for Calibre that will create/manage collections, but it doesn't exist for the Mac.
posted by rtha at 2:40 PM on June 12, 2013


I have collections set up on my Kindle Touch, so I'm under the impression the Fire works in much the same way. I have categories like History, Science Fiction and Classics, as well as one specifically for personal documents that I've uploaded to my Kindle.
posted by Telpethoron at 2:44 PM on June 12, 2013


Best answer: AFAIK collections do not work the same on the Fire as they do on the e-ink Kindles. (I have 3rd Gen Kindle ereader and 1st gen Fire, so basing it on that).

There are, however, several apps available in the amazon app store for the Fire (some are specific to model). I have not used any of these so do not know if it will fit your needs or not. Do a search for "collections" in the app store and several will come up.

Also, you might scan through/search the Kindle forum on Amazon for answers, or post a question there about which people like best, or might do what you want it to.
posted by batikrose at 3:06 PM on June 12, 2013


I've got a Kindle Touch; I categorize by both author and subject --- any author with three or more titles, I make a category for them. A couple of subjects have many different authors: for example, I've got about a dozen nonfiction books on North Korea and it's people, so those are all in one catagory. The thing to remember is, you can put one book into multiple categories.
posted by easily confused at 3:47 PM on June 12, 2013


I also have a 3rd gen Kindle e-reader (Paperwhite) and 1st gen Fire, and I also don't believe the collections feature that's on the Paperwhite is available on the Fire.
posted by still_wears_a_hat at 4:19 PM on June 12, 2013


Response by poster: Yeah, I don't think collections is a thing for the Fire -- I had them set up when I had the Kindle Keyboard, and don't see them now. :(

AFAIK Calibre's tags aren't recognized by the Fire -- if you know specific steps I should try, please post them!

:goes off to look at apps:
posted by spunweb at 5:05 PM on June 12, 2013


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