Kindle Collection Manager

Kindle is one of the best e-book reading devices in the world, but in regards of the collection management functions, it’s doing very bad job.

Collections – is the only option for managing books in Kindle. It’s something similar to tags, because one book can be contained in two or more collections. This feature could be quite ok for organizing books, but not at this time.

For now you can’t see these collections when plugging Kindle to your computer. So you can’t create, delete, edit collections, move books from one collection to another. You can do these actions only in the Kindle’s own collection manager. But the own collection manager doesn’t allow to add multiple books to collection or to remove multiple books from collection. So if you want to create a new collection and move a hundred books to it – you’ll need to spend the whole day for this job.

And managing audio-books on Kindle is a nightmare, because usually audio-book consists of many mp3 files. So when you add an audio-book to Kindle – you’ll need to create a new collection and manually move each mp3-part to it.

Kindle doesn’t allow to create folders inside the root Documents folder and organize e-book files in them. Even if you create folders when connecting Kindle to your computer, the device won’t see them and display all books on a single level.

Even deleting multiple books in Kindle is a pain. Because you have to delete books one by one, and for deleting every book you need to push the button several times and wait some time while the e-Ink screen is reloading.

Kindle’s own e-library visualization capabilities are very limited. It allows only to display books by Title, Author and last read date. And no other cataloging or sorting functions. It shows only book title and author name (only for AZW, MOBI and PDF e-books). For some books with non-English metadata Kindle shows distorted titles and author names. The titles and authors are taken from e-books metadata. And if a book has no metadata – Kindle shows just its filename. And there is no way to edit metadata in Kindle.

The only e-library layout in Kindle is very dull. It doesn’t display book covers and doesn’t provide any options to customize the e-library view.

Kindle allows to search books by metadata, but as it features English-only keyboard – you can search only for English titles and author names.

So because of all these reasons mentioned above, there is a great demand for normal Kindle book and collection manager.

And the best collection manager for Kindle is Kindlean.

It’s a Windows-based Kindle book organizer that you install to your desktop. When you connect Kindle to your PC and start the Kindlean, it scans your e-reader and displays all found books. The first scan may take some time, depending on how many books you have, but than the data is cached and all following launching procedures will be quite quick.

Kindlean is very helpful for managing Kindle collections. Using the program you can add new collections, edit collections, delete them. And you can move multiple books between collections. All these actions are done by easy drag-n-drop and mouse clicks.

Kindlean is very easy-to-use tool. But when after using the program, you’ll have not very pleasant experience in order to save the changes. The reason is that Amazon’s Kindle is very restrictive about external apps.

The collections structure is stored in a separate file and is loaded to the device RAM when it works. And when the external book manager (i.e. Kindlean) overwrites this file, Kindle will restore the old file from the RAM after the restart. That’s why after having done the changes in Kindlean and disconnect it from your PC, you’ll need to do Kindle hardware reboot. At that the old collections structure is wiped from the RAM and the new file replaces it.

Besides, Kindlean is much more feature-rich for e-library visualization. It displays book covers that are contained in the metadata. And it can even render covers from PDF files. It also provides the Table view that is perfect for sorting books by different metadata fields.

Kindlean can parse e-book metadata and also edit it. If e-book has no metadata you can enter it in the Kindlean. All metadata in Kindlean is displayed correctly in any language.

Kindlean is created by Alfa.NetSoft (the makers of the very popular book organizer Alfa Ebooks Manager).

Download Kindlean here for Free