Wednesday, December 23, 2020

Category 2: Kindle Books

The first book that I remember actively reading on a Kindle device was Anathem by Neal Stephenson. I was traveling to DC and borrowed a circulating early Kindle reader from work because it was going to be much lighter than the three inch hardcover that I was wading through at home. That was apparently February 2011 -- per my Kindle library and it was the second e-book I'd purchased from Amazon.  (The first was a short story by Eloisa James.) 

Now, ten years later, I have 219 books in my Kindle holdings. Amazon isn't known for being particularly good with allowing users to manage their libraries -- so after navigating a messy import from Amazon to Goodreads and then Goodreads to a spreadsheet and then doing cross validation of the spreadsheet back with my Amazon holdings and then cleaning up my Goodreads; I now have a spreadsheet that includes even the book I bought on Tuesday. 

Caveat: I use Goodreads to track things I've read. It's inexact but gives me a general idea of how many (mostly fiction) books I've made it through the year. I have a lifetime membership to LibraryThing and someday would love to get my print library updated and my e-library also aggregated there; and or on a catalog my sibling put together. Basically I'd like to have everything properly sorted and cataloged, but that's not a project I'm working on right now.     

Screenshot of Kindle Notification alerting that series are grouped now.
(I logged into the Kindle app on my phone tonight to learn they are grouping series now! That's nice) 
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Right now, I'm facing the pixel mountain of 174 Kindle books which are Unread. And at the rate I read books this year that'd be a half-dozen years worth of fiction reading.  I used to read 2-3 new books a week for fun and here we are in nearly 2021 and I'm wallowing in rereads (which I do not count). I also read and look at screens so much during the day that by the end I don't want to focus on a printed or e-page and I go for an audiobook instead so I can knit, or fold laundry, or just move around. 

But this is a little private library of "Things I Thought I'd Like to Read' and even working back through confirming titles and adding series information, I kept thinking "ooh, that sounds good, maybe I should start that." So Past Me was Shopping Thoughtfully for Present and Future Me. It's mostly historical romances and murder mysteries, with a few giant histories added in for good measure.  

So - using up -- or at least moving things to the Read pile. I plugged my tablet in --it's been sitting by the bed being wistful and hoping that someday I'll charge it properly. We'll see how that goes. It did at least turn on after a few minutes so I'm hopeful. Once it's had a moment and been restarted three times,  I'm going to download a few books and see about reading rather than another endless round of Farm Heroes Saga. 

I'm curious -- how do you consume ebooks? On your phone? On a separate device? My partner has moved over to a Kobo and *loves* it.... so I'm looking at the Paperwhites again if the tablet doesn't work out. 





2 comments:

  1. I feel you on the unread ebooks. I've been collecting since about 2008-ish, and went through a period of OOH LOOKIE! THERE ARE FREE EBOOKS ON AMAZON OMG!, so there are...uh....a *few* in there. (I think last count was about 1600. A chunk of those are read, though, and I'm sure I've consumed some in other formats by now. Also, a big chunk of them are things that I'm not even remotely interested in now, but organizing them on the kindle app is challenging, so...giant mess, it is.)

    And then there are the ARCs. A couple hundred ARCs. Most unsolicited, so I'm not under any kind of obligation to read/review, but I know I've missed some good'uns because of the size of the pile. ::sigh::

    2021 was supposed to be my year to dive into the digital pile, and I probably will, but there's just no way to topple it unless I DNF anything that's not five-star-worthy after ten pages.

    As far as how I consume them: I use the kindle app on my ipad, primarily. The phone app's just too small for my aging eyes these days, and gives me headaches. Most of the non-kindle ARCs are digital editions, so adobe, on the desktop, as PDFs. Pain in the patootie, but I *can* send them to kindle one at a time if I want to be in a comfy reading chair instead of at the computer desk. (They're usually big-ass files, though, so I have to commit to reading monogamously for the duration.)

    Hope your climb of Mt. Kindlebook goes swimmingly this year!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Digital editions is aaaaaaaaaawful. I hate it as a DRM Interface. So much DRM.....

    I know you can Delete things from the Kindle library -- maybe for some of those Free ebooks at least?

    GOOD LUCK with you your dive into the digital piles!!!

    ReplyDelete

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