Beach vacation, day 3, the Kindle report
I am on a family reunion vacation on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. There are 18 of us (3 small sized humans and 15 adults) and one dog in a 10 bedroom house right on the beach in South Nag's Head. The small humans are four and under, so it is noisy at times, but great fun none the less.
It has been very HOT though, too hot to read on the deck (the Kindle handles the glare just fine, but I can't handle the heat), so I have been indoors a lot. In addition to getting some writing done, one of the things I took the time to do was to set up collections on my Kindle. I blogged earlier that I was annoyed that Amazon had taken away an existing feature in this new software upgrade- the ability to display only books, or only periodicals, or only personal items. Some browsing on the Kindle users' forums showed me a way around that limitation- create collections for periodicals and personal items- and also pointed out the wisdom of using an * at the beginning of the collection names, so they always sort first in an alphabetical list.
Overall, the collection feature is pretty easy to use, and because a "collection" is really a label and not a folder, the feature is more flexible. A document can be in as many collections as needed. The great thing is, this makes the Kindle into more of a library than just a stack of books. In addition to sorting by author and title, I can now see that my science fiction (39) and fantasy (35) items are almost equal in number, while YA/kidlit is a good deal smaller (24) but still substantial. I can also now see that while the number of "read" items looks impressive at 64, the number to be read is a daunting 48! Which is not a bad thing, but I only have four more days at the beach!
And at least the pile is digital and doesn't take any room on my packed bookshelves. So, how big is your to-be-read pile?
It has been very HOT though, too hot to read on the deck (the Kindle handles the glare just fine, but I can't handle the heat), so I have been indoors a lot. In addition to getting some writing done, one of the things I took the time to do was to set up collections on my Kindle. I blogged earlier that I was annoyed that Amazon had taken away an existing feature in this new software upgrade- the ability to display only books, or only periodicals, or only personal items. Some browsing on the Kindle users' forums showed me a way around that limitation- create collections for periodicals and personal items- and also pointed out the wisdom of using an * at the beginning of the collection names, so they always sort first in an alphabetical list.
Overall, the collection feature is pretty easy to use, and because a "collection" is really a label and not a folder, the feature is more flexible. A document can be in as many collections as needed. The great thing is, this makes the Kindle into more of a library than just a stack of books. In addition to sorting by author and title, I can now see that my science fiction (39) and fantasy (35) items are almost equal in number, while YA/kidlit is a good deal smaller (24) but still substantial. I can also now see that while the number of "read" items looks impressive at 64, the number to be read is a daunting 48! Which is not a bad thing, but I only have four more days at the beach!
And at least the pile is digital and doesn't take any room on my packed bookshelves. So, how big is your to-be-read pile?