There seems to be significant interest in this long overdue feature for the Kindle, so to clear up some of the confusion for people I thought I’d look at some of the functionality and ideas surrounding Collections.
In essence, Collections are short lists of books created by the user to make browsing easier. The idea is to save time on moving through the library and keep things nicely organized along the way.
- Books can belong to more than one collection, or none at all
- Collections are built directly on the Kindle
- Your collection data will be stored by Amazon and all books will remain in their collections until you remove them
- No data is changed by Collections, they are simply an organizational tool
- While you are able to import collections from other people, this will not transfer the books themselves; simply the lists.
- There are no sub-listings. This is a one-level categorization, not a real directory tree.
So what are Collections going to be good for? In addition to saving you from having to sort through your entire library every time you want to read a specific book, there’s a lot of customization that can come into it. Since all Collections are user-created, it adds a certain depth of individuality to the device.
Some suggestions I’ve read so far:
- List by Genre
- Rate Your Books After Reading
- Keep a List of Books To Read
- Keep Track of What You’re Reading Now
- Regional Listings
- Literary Period
Any other ideas I’ve missed?
And finally, some bad news for Kindle 1 owners – it looks like Amazon is focusing all of their development effort on software version 2.* so original Kindle will not be getting the Folders update.
Is there a download link, for those of us who does not have wireless connectivity to Amazon?
I will be using this feature mainly to group books by series.
It sounds like it’s just tags, but they call it Collections instead. That’s very good news. I’m really glad they didn’t try to implement folders, which would be too restrictive (can’t have a book in more than one folder) and confusing (where did I put that book?).
Unfortunately this download is only available through their 3G cellular link and is not a downloadable option at this time.
Will this update be applied to the “original” kindles? I can’t be the only one out there who still has a Kindle 1 …..
Oh, I just noticed your last sentence …. out of luck I guess. Too bad.
Is there any of this available for those of us with the original Kindle, or are we once again left out in the cold?
-JRS
From what I have heard, we K1 owners are out in the cold. Doesn’t Amazon recognize that we early adopters are some of their best customers? Not to mention the fact that we are the ones who made noise about this deficiency in the first place.
Any idea when this update will take place? And yeah I would like to put all my classics and Gutenburg downloads in one easy convenient place. I’ve got 100 items or so on my kindle, some organization would be nice.
The tags I will most likely implement first are “Read”, “Free”, “Sci-Fi”, “Mystery”, “Mobi”, “TXT”, “ODT”, “ePub”, and all my favorite authors for which I have multiple books. Note that many books will have multiple tags… oh Collections. I am wondering if we can display say, free AND mystery but NOT read? Or do math on collections, like listing books >
$0.00. I guess we will find out when people start using it.
Is this available already? How would I know if the upgrade has occurred? Are there instructions on how to use it?
Kindle 1 (the original Kindle) left out of this update. I concur 100% with Jerry, above, who stated it well. Amazon has forgotten those who spent top dollar on an unproven product. We were, in fact, what amounts to the BETA TESTERS, the Guinea Pigs (take your pick)….or maybe the suckers. Shame on you, Amazon!
Another suggested folder would be Samples.
I am glad to hear about this update. However, as I understand, this means that I will have to uninstall my 2.3 Cyrillic Unicode hack. Will I be able to reinstall the hack. Do I have to choose between Cyrillic and collections? I need collections because I have Cyrillic installed, so I have a mixture of English & Russian with a broad mixture of literature. HELP!
Like Garian, I’ll mainly be using this to sort books by series. When I eventually get a Kindle 2, that is.
I wish I could get a tool to get my books in their collections – the current method of selecting them one at a time is just too slow. I use mine for articles (academic) and load these sometimes fifty at a time – then to organise these takes about half an hour – just crazy…