Select “Add Your Own Columns” and then add a column for kindle collections. Right click in the title/author/date menu bar area. Custom Category *Recommended*Ĭreate a custom category for your Kindle Collections. Once you hit “Save”, the collections will be sent to your Kindle. If you have a large library, this can be tremendously time consuming.
Then select your newly created collection in the dropdown box on the left, scroll your list of titles, sorted alphabetically, and click the green plus sign to add. Create a collection by typing in the name of the collection and pressing the green plus sign. (See my advice in Step 1 re using these automatic collections). You can create collections based on: Author Sort, Authors, Publishes, Read, Series, Tags, Title, and User Categories. I have the goodreads plugin installed and it shows up next to the Kindle Collections: The Kindle Collections icon shows up in the bottom of your Calibre screen. Again, if you become too granular in your user categories, you may end up with dozens of collections. Or perhaps they are genre specific: “Paranormal, Contemporary, Romantic Suspense, Historical”. Your user categories can be simple such as “Read, TBR, Unread”. You can create user categories in Calibre and this can be used as the basis for your Kindle Collections. Read more about the plugin here customization features here. This means if you have tags that are paranormal and Paranormal, Kindle Collections will treat these as one tag instead of two different tags. Uncheck if you want to control all the collections through Calibre. These are collections that you have created on the device and not through Calibre. Check this if you have collections on the Kindle device you don’t want deleted. Collections are to help you organize, not create more pages on the device to scroll through in order to find your books. More than that and again, you’ll have pages and pages of collections with only one book. Plus, if creating collections based on authors is a nice idea if you only have five or six authors.
If you download tags from Amazon or another source, it is likely that you are going to have thousands of tags with only one book in them.
Hook up the Kindle to the computer, open Calibre, and install the plugin according to instructions here. Gather your Kindle, a kindle cord, download Calibre, and the plugin. The more books you have on your device, the slower your device works particularly when loading the menu and the collections. This post walks you through the install of the plugin and the basic usage of the plugin. If you are a Calibre user, and if you aren’t, you should look into it, a programmer named meme at MobileReads created a Kindle Collections plugin which you can download here.
Thus a book in a collection on your PC will not show up in the collection on your Kindle device unless the book is downloaded onto the Kindle device.
To reduce the bugginess, I have downloaded my entire Kindle library and when I open the Kindle 4 Mac program, I wait until the entire library is loaded before I try to do anything with the Kindle 4 Mac program.