How Do I Organize Collections For Books On Kindle App?

I've been around messy Kindle libraries long enough now that I have some practical, friendly methods which work for me and hopefully for you too. These can be read within about 15 minutes and will start to improve your Kindle library management within a month or so.

Start organizing your Kindle library by first setting up the collections which act as the folders for your ebooks. Most phones and tablets allow you to select multiple covers at once and add them to a collection from the three-dot menu or by long-pressing on a cover. For organizing by function rather than genre, I have ‘TBR - Immediate’, ‘TBR - Later’, ‘Favourites’, ‘Reference’, ‘Re-reads’ and a few very minor ones like ‘Short Reads’ and ‘200-page+’. Switching between the ‘Downloaded’ and ‘All’ (cloud) views is also useful as it means you only have to keep the books you’re currently reading downloaded to save space, and viewing your library makes sense.

Numbering your collections in the title will also mean that items in that collection will appear in that order. I have ‘1 - Now’, ‘2 - Soon’, ‘3 - Reference’, ‘4 - To be returned’, ‘⭐ Favorites’, etc. As for ordering books within a collection, first off, you can sort within a collection by going to the menu (the three dots on the top right of screen on iPhone, bottom right on Android) and selecting ‘Sort’. You can sort by ‘Recent’, ‘Title’, ‘Author’, etc. within a collection depending on what makes sense for your purposes.

If you want more power user-type things, you might want to look into combining your Kindle app with a lightweight external system for tracking and organizing your books (i.e. more than just your “TBRs”). Right now, I use a spreadsheet for tracking all of the books I’ve purchased, along with any notes about them or other metadata (i.e. year of publication, where I got it, whether I’ve read it yet, etc.). But for really hard-core cataloging, “Calibre” (which can tag and catalog your books, and then sync that metadata and organize your books into collections on your Kindle, depending on the model) is worth looking into, especially if you’ve got a lot of MOBI or AZW files and need to convert a lot of them. Also, many of the features that I mentioned for organizing your Kindle books could also be applied to organizing your Goodreads shelves, which can be public or private and accessed from anywhere. And every once in a while (about every 10-15 days), I like to go through and take 10-15 minutes to organize my collections, to cull down my “TBR - Later” collection, to delete any books that I’ve already read from my “TBR - Immediate” collection, to rename anything that’s been cryptically titled, etc. The end result is a library that feels alive and active, as opposed to just being a giant hoard of books that you’ve downloaded but never read. If you’re interested in organizing your Kindle collection, I’d be happy to help you come up with a good naming system for your collections based on how you currently organize your books.

One thing I do to make my Kindle books look like a neat little bookshelf is to have a small number of high-level collections (I have ‘Now’, ‘Soon’, ‘Maybe’ and ‘Reference’ for example). I then move all books to one of these collections so that none of them are left floating around without being labeled. In mobile I use multi-select on the covers to add to a collection, in tablet I do bulk moves on a weekly basis. Using numbers or emojis in the collection name can also ensure that they are in the order that you want, rather than how the app would sort them (‘01 - Now’, ‘02 - Soon’ etc. or ‘📚 Favourites’ etc.).

Turning Downloaded vs Cloud On for books you’re currently reading ensures the app remains slim and fast. Organizing metadata for your ebook collection could also be done with a tiny spreadsheet or with the ‘Goodreads’ shelves for your non-Amazon ebooks. If you have many ebook copies, a tool to organize tags and move accordingly organized copies between devices could be Calibre. Finally, don’t allow your collections to sprawl. Keep them to 10-20 or so. Then ruthlessly cut out books in collections that are no longer relevant. Finding your next read is so much less stressful and fun when your ebook collections are kept slim.

Massive backlog? Create a ‘Sampler’ collection and put the first chapter or so of 20-30 unread books in it. Then, when you can’t decide what to read, browse to the ‘Sampler’ collection and read a few pages of 3-4 different books. The one that hooks you the most goes into your ‘Reading Now’ list, and you remove it from the ‘Sampler’ list. It’s like a wine tasting for books – a lot of fun and you often discover gems that you had purchased on a whim years ago. The ‘Sampler’ collection is constantly changing as you test and remove books from it – lots more fun than just staring at a bunch of book covers!