# Any way of creating Sub-Collections? Its very limiting for lots of documents.



## kindleguy (Jan 25, 2013)

Say you want to use your ereader as a reference guide for thousands of documents.  It certainly has the storage capacity if your documents are not large but the problem seems to be Amazon's archaic organization system that limits Collections to just one level.  Is there any way around this?  To make it much worse, they insist on double spacing the items in Collections and the Collections list itself reducing information per screen by half.  Well done Amazon!  What planet do these people live on I wonder?  Certainly not one with much stuff to read and have accessible.  

Another thing that would be great in keeping with the 21st century is the ability to add to specific Collections directly with your computer like you can with a tablet.  Create a folder and put stuff in it.  That sounds complicated.  Wow.  Understandable how this might have stumped the most brilliant minds there.  The present way seems to be to dump your document into the swill of present documents then go about laboriously moving them, one by one, to the correct Collections.  Imagine doing that with 5000 documents.  Got a year to spare?  Archaic file management.  Any way around this?

If not, what we need is someone to come up with an intelligent operating system for this marvelous device that Amazon seems bent on strangling so they can sell a few more books.  I mean, when you're only worth 100 billion or so, how's one expected to pay their bills?  Right Jeff?  Here he has created one of the greatest learning tools in history and its got the organizational sophistication of an abacus.


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## Jodi O (Mar 3, 2010)

I believe that Amazon has designed the Kindle to be as unlike a gadget as possible. It is supposed to be a simple reading device, without the distractions of a computer/tablet. We have very few options to play with, and some of us prefer it that way. I think most people use Collections as virtual shelves representing general Categories. I have things like Biography, Philosophy, Contemporary Fiction, Classics.... Many people don't use Collections at all, but have just the current book and maybe a couple _en queue_.

If you want subcategories, you may have to develop a naming scheme within the Collections. So, if you had the Collection "Philosophy", inside it you might have a naming scheme like, "Ancient - The Republic", or "Modern - Philosophical Investigations". Or you could do the same with Collections themselves, Philosophy - Ancient, Philosophy - Modern, etc.

Beyond that, you should look into the desktop software called "Calibre". It has a variety of plugins available, some with library functions. You can use Calibre to manage your library, and send books to your Kindle. You may be able to send whole collections at a time, but I'm not sure. There are other library management programs around too. I have about 1,000 books on my Paperwhite, and I prefer to manage collections on the device itself.

That said, it seems like you might be happier using a tablet and the freedom it offers to arrange things as you like. There are also niche e-ink devices that have different functionality. You can look over at the MobileRead forums as see the range of available hardware.


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## tsemple (Apr 27, 2009)

You can put things in multiple collections to simulate sub-collections. For example you could have Fiction and Fiction - Fantasy, Fiction - Thriller, etc., and you would just add all fiction to Fiction and to one or more of the sub-collections. So that is one way you could do it. Too much bother for me.

I have little enough time to read and would prefer to read rather than spend time organizing. I am not particularly focused on any particular authors or genres so I just pick up something that looks interesting and start in on it.

I would like to see Amazon develop some sort of automatic categories, mirroring how the publishers have listed their books on Kindle Store (and you could associate your own content with those categories, or override the default ones). They could also have some for ‘unread’ ‘in progress’ and ‘finished’ based on your current reading progress. And series books should collect themselves.


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## Paperbackstash (Dec 15, 2017)

kindleguy said:


> Another thing that would be great in keeping with the 21st century is the ability to add to specific Collections directly with your computer like you can with a tablet. Create a folder and put stuff in it. That sounds complicated. Wow. Understandable how this might have stumped the most brilliant minds there. The present way seems to be to dump your document into the swill of present documents then go about laboriously moving them, one by one, to the correct Collections. Imagine doing that with 5000 documents. Got a year to spare? Archaic file management. Any way around this?


I agree with you that this would be great and save tons of time and provide better organization. On my second gen fire, with documents that were sideloaded and not kindle purchased, I was able to sort into easier collections for reading and just manually move everything over at once. So much easier - then with the file manager app just find it through the organized folder. Alas on the Paperwhite I'm dependent on the collection system which, while better than nothing, is slower with the software and tedious when browsing and adding/changing.


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## Atunah (Nov 20, 2008)

You can organize Collections from a computer. You can do it from your content and device page. You can create collections there, move items in the collections from there. Makes it a lot easier. 

As to the collection system itself, I don't have any issues with it. I prefer the tag type system I think, because I can have a book in more than one collection that way. If its folders, you can't do that, unless you make a copy of the book which I don't want to do. 

I do also use calibre, but I use it just as a backup for my books basically. Even there they use the tag system, just like the kindles. But it has a lot of feature and might be something to look into. 

I have 45 collections so I have a nice system now after many years. Not all of the collections are on my kindles though. I keep most in the cloud. And once I got done putting everything in collections, its easy to keep up. Especially now that we can do it from a computer via the account.


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## barryem (Oct 19, 2010)

kindleguy said:


> Say you want to use your ereader as a reference guide for thousands of documents.


I don't think the Kindle provides what you need to do this gracefully. If the documents don't have DRM you could use Calibre to combine them into a single document and have it create a table of contents. That might do what you're asking about. When you put it in your Kindle it'll begin indexing it so you'll also be able to search it on keywords and phrases. It might make a pretty decent reference.

Calibre will do this without much difficulty. I've been told there's a plugin that can combine books. Once that's done Calibre can easily create a table of contents. I haven't used that plugin but I've seen reference to it in a number of forums. Calibre has a list of available plugins and that's where I'd look first.

If you're not familiar with Calibre it's a very powerful cataloging and ebook editing and conversion program. It's free to download and safe to use. It's not trivial to learn but it's not really all that hard to learn to do what you want to do with it. There's lots of good help here and on Mobileread forum as well as a lot of Youtube tutorials.

Barry


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## Wisteria Clematis (Oct 29, 2008)

Atunah said:


> You can organize Collections from a computer. You can do it from your content and device page. You can create collections there, move items in the collections from there. Makes it a lot easier.
> 
> As to the collection system itself, I don't have any issues with it. I prefer the tag type system I think, because I can have a book in more than one collection that way. If its folders, you can't do that, unless you make a copy of the book which I don't want to do.
> 
> ...


This is probably a dumb question but here it goes: I'm trying to organize my collections from the content and device page and love that I can choose to sort the collections A-Z if I want to. But once I am in a collection there seems to be no sort pattern at all! Is there a way to sort alphabetically by author inside each collection Surely there must be and I am overlooking it somehow.


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## Atunah (Nov 20, 2008)

Wisteria Clematis said:


> This is probably a dumb question but here it goes: I'm trying to organize my collections from the content and device page and love that I can choose to sort the collections A-Z if I want to. But once I am in a collection there seems to be no sort pattern at all! Is there a way to sort alphabetically by author inside each collection Surely there must be and I am overlooking it somehow.


Not something I ever done so I had to check. Looks like only one sort and by recent. So apparently it doesn't have sort A-Z within collections on the content page. I only use the only system to add things to collections, or take them out so I don't have use for any sorting within. But they could have put that in just as easy as most recent.


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## John Hopper (Mar 31, 2013)

Atunah said:


> Not something I ever done so I had to check. Looks like only one sort and by recent. So apparently it doesn't have sort A-Z within collections on the content page. I only use the only system to add things to collections, or take them out so I don't have use for any sorting within. But they could have put that in just as easy as most recent.


There is no option for me to manage collections from my Content and Device page; there never has been. Is this an amazon.com thing only? I am in the UK.

Sent from my Pixel XL using Tapatalk


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## Atunah (Nov 20, 2008)

John Hopper said:


> There is no option for me to manage collections from my Content and Device page; there never has been. Is this an amazon.com thing only? I am in the UK.
> 
> Sent from my Pixel XL using Tapatalk


That I don't know. Maybe someone from the UK can chime in. But if you don't have the option in the drop down on the left under content, I guess its only in the US. 
I know here in the US we have had it for some time now.


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## John Hopper (Mar 31, 2013)

Atunah said:


> That I don't know. Maybe someone from the UK can chime in. But if you don't have the option in the drop down on the left under content, I guess its only in the US.
> I know here in the US we have had it for some time now.


It's not in that drop down menu. A pity, as it would be useful. I'm considering splitting one very large collection into two smaller ones, which is a bit tiresome the regular way

Sent from my Pixel XL using Tapatalk


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## Atunah (Nov 20, 2008)

John Hopper said:


> It's not in that drop down menu. A pity, as it would be useful. I'm considering splitting one very large collection into two smaller ones, which is a bit tiresome the regular way
> 
> Sent from my Pixel XL using Tapatalk


Ah, sorry then. Yes, it is much easier to organize on the computer, especially when moving more than one book around.


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