Calibre and 'collections'

[retro]

Hi, I am new around here. First post and from the UK with a Kindle ordered which I understand I will get at the end of the month when the UK becomes 'live'.

But I have a question already, and apologies if its just too simple. Mostly I just want to read books, but I would like to use the Kindle for carrying some documentation when I travel, in particular, airfield plans, which are usually in .pdf format. I think the Kindle might be able to replace an awful lot of paper in the cockpit of a small plane. I need to be able to find docs fast in that environment.

I have fired up Calibre and am collecting various documents together, as well as a few free books I want from Gutenberg etc..

My question is this. If I tag the docs in Calibre can I use these to steer the docs into what Kindle calls collections, or will I be able use the meta tags on the Kindle? My idea is to give all airfields the tag 'A/F', and then if it is a French one the tag 'F', or German 'G' etc.. At the risk of stating the obvious in flight I just want to be able to reference say all the airfields with the tags 'A/F' and 'F' for example. Books can have their own tag, perhaps 'Fic' and 'NonFic'.

Is there a one to one mapping between tags and collections? How many layers deep can collections be?

Thanks everyone!

Perhaps I should wait until I have the Kindle, but I cant help trying to understand how to organise in advance.

[pidgeon92]

Currently, collections can only be populated on the Kindle. So no, you cannot tag your books in Calibre, send them to the Kindle, and expect them to populate the collections based on your Calibre tags.

The collections are more like tags than folders. You cannot create sub-collections. You can, however, add a book to more than one collection.

[retro]

Thanks for that Pidgeon92. So, can I select a group of things in Calibre and send them to the Kindle and ask that it put them in the 'collection'  'A/F' and also 'F' for example? If so it is still worth me tagging them in Calibre. If not I guess I have to just do the tags on the Kindle one by one.

[Basilius]

Thanks for that Pidgeon92. So, can I select a group of things in Calibre and send them to the Kindle and ask that it put them in the 'collection'  'A/F' and also 'F' for example? If so it is still worth me tagging them in Calibre. If not I guess I have to just do the tags on the Kindle one by one.

At this point Calibre knows about, but cannot manipulate, collections on the Kindle. So, it's still worth tagging in Calibre for ease of sorting and finding, but you will have to duplicate it on your kindle.

I'm sure they're working on a way to get Calibre to put books into specific collections on the Kindle, but it hasn't been figured out yet.

[Annalog]

Once a Collection is created, moving the 5-way (or new selector) to the right will bring up a page with collection options. One of these is Add/Remove Items. Selecting this will show all the items on the Kindle with the ability to sort by Author, Title, or Most Recent. If one of these sort orders will group your documents then it may be much faster to organize them in collections than using the method of selecting the document first and then the collection.

[Basilius]

Once a Collection is created, moving the 5-way (or new selector) to the right will bring up a page with collection options. One of these is Add/Remove Items. Selecting this will show all the items on the Kindle with the ability to sort by Author, Title, or Most Recent. If one of these sort orders will group your documents then it may be much faster to organize them in collections than using the method of selecting the document first and then the collection.

I second this. If you're doing a lot of books at once, it's far faster to do them collection-by-collection than book-by-book. (Assuming, of course, you have more books than collections.)

[Basilius]

At this point Calibre knows about, but cannot manipulate, collections on the Kindle. So, it's still worth tagging in Calibre for ease of sorting and finding, but you will have to duplicate it on your kindle.

I'm sure they're working on a way to get Calibre to put books into specific collections on the Kindle, but it hasn't been figured out yet.

I know it's bad form to quote yourself, but I just ended up doing some research on this.

Executive summary: there is no known way to easily manipulate kindle collections outside the kindle. You can do it, but it's very kludgy and currently error prone.

Details: Kindles create a backup of their current collections content in a file called "collections.json" The problem is that manipulating this file doesn't actually change the collections unless you turn off wireless and restart your kindle. Also, the entries in this "collections.json" file are MD5 hashes of the book filenames and sometimes some other information. So even entering data into this file may not get the results you want.

I wouldn't look for this to be added to Calibre any time soon unless the Kindle SDK is published and they provide access to the collections. Kovid Goyal (Calibre's lead developer) doesn't use collections, and he isn't highly motivated to add this feature. So, it's only going to appear if either Amazon publishes API access information, or another Calibre contributor decides to work on it, or both.

[retro]

Thanks everyone for the input. It has given me some clues, but mostly I think I must wait until I have it in my hands.

[accwebworks]

For those who are interested in managing kindle collections on their pc. I have created web utility that will create collections.json file out of your folder structure on your pc.
All you need to do is organize your ebooks in folders of your choice and they will become collections on kindle.
Take a look and let me know if you encounter any issues.

http:///www.accwebworks.com/kindle.aspx