I decided to try to clean up/organize/purge my Kindle app. Why does this have to be so hard? I read over 90% of my books on my iPad. I wish there was an easy way to put things in categories. There isn’t. Well, actually, if you were a good person who started being organized when they first started using the app and didn’t wait over 10 years before trying it might be easier.

Kindle has this thing called Collections. Basically you can make a categories to shelve books in. I did a previous organizational attempt where I made categories for books by genre and then separated into Read and Unread. I figure that’s still a good system if I kept up with it. But I started today with 440 books in Uncategorized. Ugh.

If I was in charge of the Kindle App, here is what I would make it do.

Library Books

I get a lot of ebooks from the library. It is super convenient and integrates well with the library app. However, when the book gets zapped back to the library when my time with it is up, it doesn’t leave the Kindle app. The cover picture is still listed right there. If you click on it you get a message that it got returned or can’t be opened. So make the picture go away when you take the book away!

Also when they take the book away you get a little file that says that the book went bye-bye. To get rid of it you have to delete each one separately. I had hundreds. Let me bulk delete them or BETTER YET don’t send me these. Just make the book picture go away with the rest of the book’s data.

Make it easy

When you finish an ebook, a little screen comes up and asks if you would like to rate it. Then that star rating goes right to Goodreads and Amazon. If you can do that, you should be able to also choose to move the book to a collection on that screen. I would immediately move it to Read. Don’t rely on me going back and remembering to move the book to clean up the interface. As we can see it isn’t going to happen routinely. In the absence of this, I’m going to try to remember to move books when I finish them.

What’s the big deal anyway? Why does it need to be organized better?

If I open the app and look in my library I see a list of books. A good portion of them are books that I had from the library before. I have to move past all the ones that I know I don’t have anymore before finding things that I could read. I can have the app sort the list by read or unread, source, or title but I know I’m still forgetting that certain books are on there. I need to be able to see the books I want to read next.

I was all proud of myself for making a TBR category and putting books in it that I want to read soon. That’s a good idea right?

Problem is, after I did that I discovered a collection that I called Priority Reads. Guess how many of those books I have read? Yeah, you’re right, none! Maybe it will go better this time…..

There were so many books in my Kindle library that I swear I have never heard of in my life. I swear they are breeding.

I admit that I finally made a collection called Done With and shoved everything that I know I’m either never going to read or have read and didn’t want to take the time to properly categorize into there.

So now, hopefully, when I open my Kindle library, I will see a list of books that I haven’t read yet. Just to be an overachiever I did start reading a book that I put on the TBR list. I swear, I have never heard of this book in my entire life. I have no clue how it got on my Kindle. (I looked it up. I got it July 1, 2021 and it was free. Free books – That’s where they get you. Maybe this was a Kindle First Reads book.)

Does anyone else have any better ideas of how to not lose your books in the mess of your Kindle library?