Better Kindle paperwhite book management
July 9, 2017 9:20 PM   Subscribe

Is there any way to better manage books on a Kindle Paperwhite than jailbreaking the device? Or is jailbreaking reversible, or not that device-altering?

My wife has a Kindle Paperwhite that she enjoys, but it's a hassle to shuffle through books. She asked me to find a better way to manage books on there, including books I've loaded onto the device (not directly from Amazon), and the most encouraging option was to jailbreak the device. We don't want it modified in ways that aren't reversible, in case we need to ask Amazon to fix it at some point in the (near) future, assuming it has an issue while under warranty.
posted by filthy light thief to Technology (7 answers total) 10 users marked this as a favorite
 
I don't have a Paperwhite. I have an older Kindle, but would putting them in folders make it easier to quickly find what you're looking for?

If you're loading books on, I'm guessing you may be using Calibre. If so, then I think you can create folders and add books to folders within Calibre, which may be an easier way to manage a large library than adding books to folders one at a time in the Kindle interface.
posted by willnot at 9:42 PM on July 9, 2017


Manage in what ways, exactly? I have a paperwhite and the vast majority of my things on it are books, but I have added them from non-amazon sources and so they show up as "documents." But I don't care, because I keeps things pretty corralled in folders that are organized by genre (big, flexible groups like "fiction," "nonfiction," "mystery,") and also by status ("active," "done"). I do these category-organizing things mostly on my paperwhite, when I'm adding something to it, rather than managing it via Calibre, but that may be an idiosyncratic way of doing it. I have my paperwhite set to show me the stuff I have have by collection view, so when I open it, I see folders the folders I've named (active, done, fiction, non-fiction, mystery, SF, other) and of course things can live in more than one folder. It's not perfect but it suits my "what do I want to read now" style.
posted by rtha at 10:45 PM on July 9, 2017 [2 favorites]


It’s not clear from the question how you are adding the third-party books to the Kindle. If you add them by emailing them to the special kindle address you can find in the settings, they get stored by Amazon in the cloud, you can manage them via the Amazon website, and they automatically get synced between devices. I don’t think any of that happens if you add them via a USB cable (which I used to do but haven’t done recently so I don’t know what the current situation is).
posted by Bloxworth Snout at 12:18 AM on July 10, 2017


I would second trying out Calibre. I have used it to add/organize books in the past, it was a little clunky at the time but that was several versions ago.
posted by Captain_Science at 2:32 AM on July 10, 2017


When I asked what may be a similar question to yours, the results were not encouraging. The upshot, for me, is that the kindle is perfectly suited for reading but pretty much sucks at doing the sorts of things a computer can do effortlessly.
posted by DrGail at 5:35 AM on July 10, 2017 [1 favorite]


Is she using the collections feature? It's not ideal, but it's something. I sort my books into collections like fiction/memoir/science/etc and one more for currently reading. You also need to switch the sorting option to Collection in order for the paperwhite to show them by folder only.
posted by gennessee at 9:33 AM on July 10, 2017


2nding using the Collections feature - I just started using it myself to organize my Kindle. I bought it used on eBay years ago and have gotten books from a variety of outlets including Amazon, Project Guttenberg and my local library.
posted by Shadow Boxer at 6:28 PM on July 10, 2017


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