How often do you clean up your library? (As opposed to hoarding...)

[Brownskins]

I've always had this question at the back of my mind but never got to discuss it with other e-reading friends:

How often do you clean up your library?  I don't mean shelving, but rather, permanently erasing books that you know you probably won't be:
1) reading again; or
2) ever reading in the first place.

I ask this cause I do get tempted by price drops and sales a lot, but after a couple of months and looking back at the accumulated ebooks, I find myself disposing of the books that I don't really want anymore.  I like my collection streamlined and well appointed - just like tasteful furniture and fixtures at home.  

So for me, it is once a quarter on the average, and I end up deleting at least 10-15% of my books (no recycling here except that it frees up the cloud somewhere...).  (Sometimes I allow for eraser's remorse and keep the deleted books in archive.  But after another week, I just go ahead and delete them, knowing that I probably won't ever choose or read them.)  I don't know.... it's kinda like cleaning up my desk.... it takes a lot of determination but once it's done, it's gratifying.  What are your thoughts on this?

[jonathanmoeller]

Never. If I want to find anything, there's always the Search option.

I salve my conscience with the knowledge that when I die, my executor will find it quite easy to deal with my ebook collection. My physical book collection, not so much. 

[tinytoy]

Never.  I am an e-book hoarder. What I do remove from device are library books once the loan period has ended, and notices from Amazon alerting me that loans have ended or have been returned. I haven't once deleted an e-book that I own.  My e-library is quite disorganized; I haven't even categorized anything. I sort by "recent" so the book I am currently reading is always at or near the top.

[Carolyn62]

I archive mine. Sometimes I change my mind about liking a book, my mood changes.

[Atunah]

I need to go through and delete some. When I first got my Kindle in 2008,I just clicked on a lot of free stuff I will never read. I had to learn about publishers and such and to read more careful descriptions. So what I thought then were romance novels for example, turned out to be christian fiction books, which I would never ever read. So they are just taking up space in my account.

Problem is, its so hard to go through the list and delete. I have 1200 books and when I say finally make it to page 25 and delete a book, I get thrown right back to the first page. Same goes if I sort by date purchased and start at the end. So it makes it a bit of a chore. I think there are about 100 or so books that just need to go forever. But its been 3 years, so I would have to pull up each book, then do a search on it on sites to see what it is about and then either keep or get rid off.

One day when I have a few hours to waste I guess.  

eat: Oh, and I am talking about my archive, not my Kindle.

[Brownskins]

Atunah, to your credit, I have only had about 8 months' worth of books.  Your point is exactly my fear, that I may have more books than I can afford to organize.  The archive and the cloud feature is convenient, but then again, if I made a mistake in buying a book, IMO, I need to undo that mistake.  Weird, I know, but I guess that's the OCD part of me... 

[QuantumIguana]

Never. The books can sit neatly on my hard drive. No need to throw them away.

[Luvmy4brats]

Almost never.

I figure that eventually somebody on my account *may* want to read one of them. They aren't hurting anybody sitting in my archives. I've been building my library for 4 years and have well over 1,200 books.

[Brownskins]

LOL... I guess the numbers come with age (Kindle-age, that is)... 1200 books are a lot to read... maybe the next step would be to have a collection of "Cliff notes" for the books in our libraries... 

[Atunah]

I have lists about my lists.  List to plug all the holes holes in the sieve that is my brain.

[stevene9]

I have recently changed. I used to keep a copy of each book on my computer, because about half of my 700 odd books are from non Amazon sources. But since we now have the cloud, I have sent all my non Amazon books to my Kindle so they are now kept in the cloud. Since all my ebooks are now kept in the cloud, I no longer feel a need to keep them elsewhere. I will take the chance that Amazon will not go bankrupt in my lifetime.

[Meka]

I try not to purchase a book until I'm ready to read it, this way I don't have a bunch of unread books on my Kindle. If I come across or hear about a book that I think might interest me I add it to my wish list on Amazon. The only time I make an exception is when Amazon has the $1 books for the SO Kindles or I catch something on the daily deal, and I keep those purchases on my Kindle Blackberry App until I'm ready to read them. My goal is to max my Kindle out and be able to say I have read every book on it. To finally answer the question, I don't plan to clean up my library until it's maxed out. I have lot's and lot's of reading to do!

[DH_Sayer]

I've just started messing around with the collections. Useful, but it seems to get easily cluttered again. Which I'm finiding I don't really mind.

[ak rain]

That's the good thing about folders.
Sylvia

[Ann in Arlington]

Well, first, I only buy from Amazon.  Early in my Kindle life (about 3½ years now) I got a few things from elsewhere but never found the quality and decided there's enough available on Amazon that I don't need to search further afield.

SO. . .all my books are available via my account on Amazon, and I mark them read in the 'your collection' section so that I'll know whether, well, I've read them.

On the device(s) I used to keep everything I hadn't read.  That got a bit unwieldy and the kindle in question was pretty slow to find things. . .speedy when reading, but search and even just going home to choose a new book took a looonnngggg time. But now I have several Kindles so I tend to keep different things on each one, though I also have 'sync' working and sometimes read the same thing on different devices. 

I used to have over 1300 books. . .but realized a lot I'd gotten in my misbegotten Kindle youth were freebies that, really, I was not going to read.  Stuff I got in the euphoria of "free books, oh wow!"  I've become more discerning as I matured in my Kindle life so have been slowly going through my 'books' listing at MYK and permanently deleting those that I really don't need to have.

I do have collections. . .and most books I've owned have been assigned to at least one, but I honestly don't use them regularly.  I tend to just have a sort of "TBR" list of the next books I'm looking to read straight on the home page.  If none of those appeal in the moment, I go to my Fire and spin the carousel until something strikes me.  Wonderfully therapeutic!

[dbeman]

If I've actually paid for a book I will never permanently delete it. I don't download many free books because there just aren't a whole lot of them that appeal to me; but I would be more apt to delete those if I felt as though I need to "tidy things up" a bit.

However I'm far from a hoarder, so this is usually not an issue for me. I think in a year and a half of e-reading I've accumulated just under 30 books.

[Brownskins]

Ann, that is a great recount of your kindle "coming of age".  I do have 5 devices (only 2 of which are Kindles but the other 3 have Kindle apps), and I intend to learn from you:  (1) Be more discerning and practice restraint at the point of purchase (or download, if a lucky freebie); (2) to maximize use of the cloud for my entire library; (3) to keep my quarterly (having done it 3-quarters now) habit of "cleaning" up my collection of stray freebies or discounted books that caught my fancy at the time of advertisement; and (4) to keep a manageable (maybe 5-10) books that I am currently reading or want to read in each device that I own.

I am learning from y'all... thanks.  I feel like a toddler compared to all of your "years of experience".  I was a late adopter, and yet I embraced ereading quick.  I now have 5 ereaders, 2 of which are Kindles and others with Kindle apps...  

[LauraB]

I archive mine. Sometimes I change my mind about liking a book, my mood changes.

This is what I do too. I don't keep all my books on my Kindle, Just the ones I haven't read yet. Four pages worth, which is embarrassing enough! Anything I've already read I archive, unless it was just awful, I've only actually deleted 3 books because they were just  so bad I didn't want to own them  .

[caseyf6]

I had to do a huge cleanup when I was gifting my K2 to my dd.  I wanted to keep many of the books, so I checked all the titles on the K2 and went to the Manage Your Kindle page and had them transferred to my (hidden) K3.  Ugh.  I didn't want to overload the poor K3, so this happened over a period of months.  (Yes, months...there were 1000 unread books...)

I ended up not transferring about 150 of those books, and some I flat-out deleted because they had been freebies and I am more picky now.  (Terrible quality, or more of a risque "romance" than I'll ever want to read.)

[Meemo]

There's only been one book I've completely deleted from my account - a book my daughter bought and was horrified by the contents - I figured if she couldn't hack it the rest of us on the account surely couldn't so I deleted it.  Otherwise, they all stay in there since there are 4 of us on the account.  All the Amazon books I want to read but haven't yet are on my K3.  I also have quite a few books in Calibre from other sources that I'd like to read - most of those are also on my K3.  The K3 essentially functions now as my TBR library.  I put books on my Fire or BabyK or other devices as I read them - they don't need to be there all the time, just when I'm ready to read them.  As soon as I finish a book, I delete it.  Unfortunately I seem to add books faster than I read them, but that's okay - at least they aren't taking up space or collecting dust in my house. And it isn't the "cleanest" of all systems, but it works for me. 

[The Hooded Claw]

I  just don't permanently erase anything. Little incentive to do so, and I would feel like a twit if I later wanted something I had deleted.

[Ann in Arlington]

I  just don't permanently erase anything. Little incentive to do so, and I would feel like a twit if I later wanted something I had deleted.

For a long time I resisted deleting anything for just this reason. . .. but at some point I was looking at some of the titles in my library and thought, "why the heck do I even have that?"  Since it was 'free' when I 'purchased' it, and I knew the chances of me ever actually reading it were somewhere between slim and none, I just got rid of it.  And then went and found a few more that fell into the same category.  Again, they were indiscretions of my Kindle youth when I could be seduced by the word 'free'.

[Hadou]

When I get 5 or 6 new books, I'll kinda clean house a bit.  But, I'll usually remove a book once I read it if I remember to (after backing it up).

[leigh7911]

SO. . .all my books are available via my account on Amazon, and I mark them read in the 'your collection' section so that I'll know whether, well, I've read them.

I suspect I'm being a bit thick, but I can't find anything called a 'your collection' on amazon. Is it somewhere besides MYK?

[Pawz4me]

I permanently delete about 99.5 percent of the fiction books I read as soon as I finish reading them.  It's an extremely rare fiction book that I'll ever read a second time, and I can't stand clutter of any kind.  I'm slightly little less quick to permanently delete non-fiction books, but I don't keep them forever.

[Ann in Arlington]

I suspect I'm being a bit thick, but I can't find anything called a 'your collection' on amazon. Is it somewhere besides MYK?

Go to your account and sign in.  Under 'digital content' you'll see a link to 'your collection'.  It pretty much has any book (whether e- or p-), video, mp3 or periodical you ever purchased as well as software or video games.  If you narrow it to 'kindle books' you can sort it various ways and search for specific books and then give them star ratings.  You can also enter notes if you want about the book or tag them for you own use.

There's also a separate site:  kindle.amazon.com where you sign in and see a list of just kindle books.  You can mark them as being read, been read, or to be read.  And give a star rating. . .the 'collection' will reflect that rating as well.  This is the area where you can share highlights if you want and see public ones.

And of course there's the 'books' section of MYK, but you can't do much there other than send it to a device.

I am looking forward to Amazon combining these three similar lists into one functional and useful database.

[leigh7911]

Go to your account and sign in.  Under 'digital content' you'll see a link to 'your collection'.  It pretty much has any book (whether e- or p-), video, mp3 or periodical you ever purchased as well as software or video games.  If you narrow it to 'kindle books' you can sort it various ways and search for specific books and then give them star ratings.  You can also enter notes if you want about the book or tag them for you own use.

OH! Thank you!! I'd never noticed that before. (Obviously.  ) Love the 'covers' view.

I have been to the kindle.amazon site, and am quite amused that it catches the star ratings given on the kindle itself (as does the 'your collection,' I see now), but have a hard time making it believe me sometimes. There's a couple of books that I've marked as read repeatedly that it STILL categorizes as to be read. Ah well.

Right now I've got a couple of 'read' collections (one for books in 2011 and one for short stories), but sooner or later I'm gonna need to move those off if I don't lay off the free books. Ahem. Glad there's ways to still see what they are rather than going through the huge MYK list and guessing which is which.

[caseyf6]

That is a really neat site (like goodreads but I don't have to input everything).  However, it only shows 25 of my Kindle books?!  Any advice?

[Ann in Arlington]

That is a really neat site (like goodreads but I don't have to input everything).  However, it only shows 25 of my Kindle books?!  Any advice?

Go to the next page?

I'm not sure which site, specifically, you're referring to.  But on all the Amazon ones I mentioned, it does show only a limited number of books at once but there are multiple pages you can select.

[mom2karen]

I didn't know about kindle.amazon.com.  What do you have to do for it to register a book as read?  It only has 7 of my books marked read. 

I just did a big clean up of my 1,000+ kindle books.  I had over 700 on my K2 (mostly unread) and it was getting super slow.  I also am adding my mom onto my account and wanted to be able to find books for her.  Here is how I did it....

I was most concerned about my archived books and the ones not sorted on my K2 (about 200).  I dreaded using the K2 for this and heard that the new versions of Kindle for PC had collections so decided to try using it.  I already had collections on my K2 with about 3/4 of them sorted.  I updated Kindle for PC and imported the collections which was applied to all the books in my PC (downloaded and archived books) that had been sorted on my K2.  I right clicked on each title and looked at the add to collection section (would be nice if books in collections didn't appear on the main page so I didn't have to look at every book).  If it didn't have a collection and I had no idea where it belonged I searched for the book on Amazon and then put it into the right collection.  If it was a freebie that I no longer wanted I stuck it in my "delete" collection. 

I then went to my K2 and deleted each collection and imported them from my PC.  That got my uncollected books on my K2 down from 22 pages to 4.  I went through those 4 pages (mostly apps that the PC doesn't get and books from non-Amazon sources) and sorted them into collections.  The next time I sync collections I'll leave my "games" and "non-amazon" collections on my K2 and delete the PC copy when it comes over.  I think that will keep those 4 pages of books contained. 

My next step was to go to ManageMyKindle and search for each book in my K2's delete collection.  I opened up multiple windows of it so I didn't have to wait for my1,000+ book list to load after deleting each title.  I would search in one window for a title, hit delete and OK, then move to the next window for the next title.... By the time I got to the last window the first was done and ready for a new search.  I then deleted each book in my delete collection on my K2.  I then went to my PC app and synced to get rid of the books I already deleted.  There were about 30 books still in the folder so I deleted those on MMK too. 

It took me about 6 hours and I was able to sort about 80 books that my mom will enjoy.  Unfortunately with the TONS of new free books I already have 100 more to sort, but I don't think it will take too much time since I know what I'm doing now.

[bwbollom]

I'd say somewhere between never and almost never. The K3 holds a few thousand books...I probably have about a thousand on there. I'm positive I'll never get around to reading them all, but whenever I pick it up, I like the idea that all of my options are right there! I have deleted free books that I started and just hated...no need for clutter that I know I'll never read. But for the most part they stay right there on my K3.

As for the archive...I don't know why I'd delete them. What if my wife decides she wants to read something that was once there? I might have hated it, but we don't have the exact same taste. I'm fine with letting stuff sit in the archive until some future someone decides they might want to check it out.

[caseyf6]

Go to the next page?

I'm not sure which site, specifically, you're referring to.  But on all the Amazon ones I mentioned, it does show only a limited number of books at once but there are multiple pages you can select.

Ann, I meant the kindle.amazon page-- it only shows me as having 25 Kindle books!!  No extra pages, nothing.  25-- total.  If I choose "all books" it gives me every book I've ever purchased from them, Kindle plus regular.  So I had to go through and delete all of the dtb from the list so my Kindle books were sortable the way I wanted them to be.  Very annoying.

[Ann in Arlington]

Ann, I meant the kindle.amazon page-- it only shows me as having 25 Kindle books!!  No extra pages, nothing.  25-- total.  If I choose "all books" it gives me every book I've ever purchased from them, Kindle plus regular.  So I had to go through and delete all of the dtb from the list so my Kindle books were sortable the way I wanted them to be.  Very annoying.

Hmmm.  On mine, there's a menu along the top.  It says "Your books" and you can click for what set you want -- reading, have read, stopped reading, etc.  Just below that is a light blue bar with a page selector.  I have 52 pages.

[Mips]

I don't delete them but I do archive them off my devices.

My K3 started to get really, really slow when it got over 1K books.  I spent some time archiving them one by one until I got the total of about 100 on the device itself.  I still saw more to buy, taking advantage of price drops on books, but I didn't want to download them just to immediately archive them.  I downloaded the Kindle for PC ap to my pc so that the books had a place to be bought to.  I rarely access my Kindle for PC so they stay up in the cloud until I am ready to access the collection to load the specific book to my Kindle.

Unless it is a book that I actively use for reference or maybe the preceding book in a series I am currently reading, I archive them as soon as I am done with them.   I keep my new actual Touch collection equally small.  It is a lot easier to go straight to or from archive on the Touch.

i will not let the active collections on any of these devices get over 300 again, with 100 being my optimum.  100 covers most of my moods, current obsessions and books in progress.

[Brownskins]

Happy holidays everyone! I love Christmas and the afterglow... Gives me a chance to clean up and organize my home and my devices. And hopefully finish a book. Will now put into practice the good advice given this far... 5S everyone!!!