After we talked about snatching up those eBook deals it’s time to get some organization done. I didn’t start this right away. After a while I realized I am having a ton of books on my kindle but can’t really find what I am looking for. Or what I am in the mood for. Today I share my eBook organization with you – there might some helpful tips and tricks in here that you can adapt. Let’s get started:
eBook organization
1. Organizing your Amazon library
Unfortunately the amazon library lacks filtering and organizing your ebooks. But there are a few ways to make it work. First of all I would suggest gathering books in “Sammlungen” aka “Collections”.
Having collections helps to actually find what you are looking for. The books I read are often chosen by my reading mood. So I organized my collections accordingly calling them “Christmas”, “Life Coach Stuff” and “Short Story”. Additional to the most read genres like “fantasy”, “sci-fi”, “romance” and “thriller”. This way I can only browse the book I feel like reading.
Having read those books I add them to lists of 1-5*. Furthermore I keep collections called “Delete” and “Keep” as well as a one called “Bought”. Those help to streamline when actually cleaning out the library.
All those collections are transferred to my kindle and to the kindle app on my phone.
2. Keeping your amazon library clean
As I mentioned I have a lot of collections. Every once in a while I will check how many books are in my 1* & 2* collection and I will delete those permanently. I will never read them again and I most likely won’t recommend them to any family member.
Regularly I clean out the “Delete” collection as well.
Recently I took some time and checked every book I own to see if I will ever read it. If it was a NO I deleted it. This way I got rid of a few books – I still have over 600 unread ebooks. Upps.
3. Organizing your Goodreads app
Unfortunately amazon.de and Goodreads don’t sync (if you know of a trick tell me!) So every book I buy must be added to Goodreads manually. I actually took the time to add all the books in my amazon library manually into Goodreads shelfs. Here you can find “kindle TBR“, “ebook bought” and “kindle-freebie“.
The Goodreads app is also the place where I keep track of my physical TBR by adding it to the shelf with just that name. And of course some physical books can be sold or swapped and there is a shelf for that as well. Because cleaning out the physical stack is also a good practice.
I have read people are shelving their ebooks in alphabetical order. That is something I never considered as I could easily check that in my Amazone library or my Goodreads app. I have to admit though that I rarely pick books by the author and often can’t remember who a book was by. Of course I do have a few authors that I always remember and maybe even see if there is a new book out but I am not fangirl-crazy about it. However I wished Goodreads had a statistic about how many books I read by an author and then recommend based upon that.
This is the way my ebook organizations works. Do you have any tips and tricks and workflows you can share? I am always interested how others do that because I am sure there are ideas I haven’t thought off yet.
And if you want to talk more about books come join me on Goodreads or check out all my book posts.
Happy organizing
2 comments
Thanks so much for these tips. I get most of my books from the *(digital) library and keep track in Goodreads.
I envy you for the digital library. Goodreads is a pretty good place to keep track. I rely on it too.