Right now, all of your downloaded eBooks are presented on your Kindle’s home page. They can be sorted in three ways: by most recently accessed, by title, or by author. This works fine if your home page only sports a few pages of books, but many Kindle owners have dozens or even hundreds of books downloaded to their Kindle.

(The current 6″ Kindle reader can hold 1,500 books; the larger Kindle DX can hold 3,500 books.)

Judging from our Kindle user forums, the most requested Kindle feature by far is for “folders” – i.e. some type of filing system to help organize those ever-growing libraries of downloaded eBooks. Kindle owners are taking encouragement about this from today’s post on the Kindle facebook page:

“Kindle Customers, We have heard from many of you that you would like to have a better way to organize your growing Kindle libraries. We are currently working on a solution that will allow you to organize your Kindle libraries. We will be releasing this functionality as an over-the-air software update as soon as it is ready, in the first half of next year. – The Kindle Team“.

Note that Amazon’s facebook author (man, I want that job!) avoids using the word “folders”. I think it’s more likely Amazon will introduce a system where eBooks can be tagged, and thus sifted and sorted into different views based on user-assigned tags.

What do you think? Are folders the answer? Tagging? Some other feature? Discuss it with other Kindle owners.

Comments

“I made it a point to have at least three months to explore and come to know my Kindle before writing this review…”

“The screen does appear to look very much like paper. As a student, I spend a lot of my time in front of screen for one reason or another, and the biggest issue I have is the eye strain. With my Kindle, I have not had any issues with eye strain and so forth. The E-ink technology is what I have to thank for that lack of eye strain. With a screen appearing as paper, the colors used for the Kindle is limited to black ink…”

“Dictionary: If I didn’t know the meaning of a word in a book, the odds were I would not look it up. Now with my Kindle and after a couple of clicks, I know the meaning of whatever questionable word I come across. This is an excellent additional feature…”

“The music player on the Kindle is an experimental feature. It works like an iPod Shuffle and plays songs at random. I don’t recommend this for serious music listening. It would be best to upload a couple of favorite mellow songs to read to…”

“I would recommend this device to any college student (or any person, in general) that loves to read. This doesn’t add much to the heavy book load I already have to lug around. Adding my notes to my Kindle has saved me space in my binder and money for printing paper and ink. No need to bring my USB cord to campus, too. Just send my notes to my Kindle at the end of class via Whispernet.”

Read her full review here. And, be aware that you can still find original Kindles, used and at lower prices, and guaranteed by Amazon. Or, to check out Kindle 2, click here.

Comments

Meanwhile, for the readers in the group: of the best picture nominees, two (Doubt and Frost/Nixon) were adapted from stage plays. The Reader is a Swiss book, originally published in German, and unfortunately, not available in a Kindle edition. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is a short story written by F. Scott Fitzgerald. It is available for free from Feedbooks. Slumdog Millionaire is based on the book Q & A: A Novel, by Vikas Swarup and is available for the Kindle. Click the cover to the left to download a sample or buy the book from Amazon. What’s your verdict? Is the book better than the movie or vice versa?

Lance is a junior at Hartwick College in Oneonta, NY. He spent the month of January in Jamaica taking a course called “Transcultural Nursing.” As part of the preparation, the students were supposed to print out and bring with them approximately 100 journal articles. Lance decided, instead, to use his Kindle to save paper and weight. It took him about a day to run the articles through Mobipocket Creator (most of them were PDFs) and load them onto his Kindle.

Once in Jamaica, Lance was freed from lugging a huge notebook around — that was the biggest benefit. He did note that it is harder to flip through an article as you would with the paper version. He also wished he learned about the highlighting feature earlier, which he happened to stumble upon near the end of the course.

Visit Kindleboards to read more about his trip and see a few pictures from the island. You can also hear him discuss his trip in more detail, including using a Kindle on the beach, with Len Edgerly on the next installment of The Kindle Chronicles podcast, due to be uploaded on Friday, February 6th.