kindle: reading, organization

[amezri]

After finally having some time to read a book on my Kindle 3, I've discovered two things:

+ I haven't quite gotten the hang of holding it in one hand and reading/page turning. After a while, it does get a bit heavy.
+ The way it arranges collections is annoying as hell.

There are four options for listing your books: most recent (-ly read), title, author, collections. The collection system is basically a tag system, since you can assign a book to multiple collections and browse from there. The ultra annoying part is that you can't easily list a book series in order. My Temeraire books so no series number notations at all, so I've resorted to creating a note with the book number. Annoying.

There is supposedly a way to get Calibre tags to work with the Kindle by dropping a Python script in the root directory, and I might actually give it a try since I'm going to move most of my PRC files over and it would be great to have things set into collections more easily than adding them on at a time manually on the Kindle itself. Of course, that means I'm going to have to install Calibre and tag all my my current book collection. Tedious, but it probably needs doing?

In other Kindle news, the cover I purchased finally arrived. It's a much darker color than is shown on the product page, but that's totally okay. As I was hoping, the cover is practically TARDIS blue! I'm a fan. My only gripe is that the upper left corner doesn't fit exactly right, but it's secure and that's all I'm going to expect from a $10 leather cover. It smelled a bit like chemical plastic/menthol when I first unwrapped it, but the smell is dissipating.

Okay, off I go to add some books to my Kindle and drop a python script on it. Wish me luck!

Edit @ 11:07pm: Well, it took me a couple hours of fiddling, but using this python script and Calibre, I was able to get Kasterborous (yes, that's what I named my Kindle 3) to automatically create collections for series and authors. Woot! \o/

Also, I was under the impression that you could not place subfolders in your Kindle documents folder, but Calibre seems to set up author folders for the books that are transfered and it works perfectly fine.

Edit @ 11:23pm: There is some tag/collection weirdness, but I think it has more to do with how I accidentally duplicated the series & author collections by using unnecessary tags (because I didn't read the directions). I'm not really sure how I'm going to fix that now. Argh.

Edit @ 12:20am: Fixed my collection weirdness! Turns out I should have been using the Rebuild *.bat file (running it from the Kindle - this will wipe out all your other Kindle Collections made manually) instead of the trying to run the python script again. I also removed the "- " prefix from the Collection display, which was kind of annoying, and changed the "Miscellany" collection name to "Miscellaneous." After a restart, my Kindle is organized as well as it can be. Hurray!

Comments

[fyrdrakken]

Using the Kindle app on the Blackberry means it's not too heavy for my hand -- but I have to scroll more often because the screen is smaller, and if I spend too much time reading in a day (or reading alternated with lots of something else involving repetitive motion) I start getting numb or tingly fingers. I have to make a point of changing hands periodically.

Hmm, collections? That may be a distinction between having a proper Kindle and having a mere app, since I don't appear to have a collections option. Which is why I've had to resort to things like having a separate app for reading fanfic to separate it from the profic, and briefly opening each book of the series I'm going to be reading in the Kindle app so that they'll be at the top of the list when sorted by access date. (Also there's the thing where I have my entire Kindle collection on the app on my netbook, but on the BB app only the books I'm likely to be reading soonish (or need to read and can't download from Amazon because I bought it from elsewhere, like directly from the publisher). Less titles to scroll through-- especially since I tend to remove them from the BB app after reading them.)

[amezri.livejournal.com]

Yup, none of the Kindle apps have the collection feature, but on the other hand, the Kindle doesn't really show you the covers until you look at the book info.