Some time ago, years now, I sorted my ever growing Amazon Kindle collection of ebooks — then probably around 500 books total — into a small handful of broad collections: Speculative, Mystery, Horror, etc. I made the mistake of treating each collection as unique. A book, for me at that time, could ever only fit into one collection at a time and a lot of it came down to vibes. I have sense fixed this mentality but it dominated for years.

There was a slight issue and that was how to sort both bigger collections and bigger sets of collections. Take a trip with me, if you will, to the now defunct Kindle World Blog of 2011.1 I got the snapshot from around the time the blog was last updated so you can see the history of comments…

The long and short was that the Kindle has strikingly been inadequate for sorting through large libraries for a long time. Doubly-so back in the era when you had to manually click the button and wait a few moments for the screen to refresh. A dozen or so pages could be a commitment. Write off your whole afternoon.

To get around the issue of getting through several collections and then having to get through several pages of a collection to find the books I was currently reading or wanting to read, I created a special collection called “CURRENT.” That’s where those books went. At least at first.

For various reasons — a fear of “losing” a book into the clicks and the fear of sorting a book into the [*gasp!*] incorrect collection — I started eventually adding a significant percentage of every book I purchased on Kindle into the CURRENT collection. Which meant it did not take long before it hit 100-200 ebooks and was now a problem in and of itself. I’m still having to click for half a minute. Some of these books I barely remember. I get new books all the time and just read those instead. CURRENT, eventually “1. Current,” became too sizeable to use.

This year it hit over 600 books and I realized that I had to either delete the whole thing (and let chaos reign) or try and come up with a solution. Here, then, is my plan.

I have now renamed the collection to “2026- TBR” as in “The To Be Read Pile from 2026 and Before”. I took out the books from that collection that I am actually currently reading, reading the series, or hoping to read very shortly and put it in a new “1. Currently Reading” collection. The numbers at the start help to sort these to the top.

There are currently 30+ books in the latter. Note I am not actually “currently reading” that many but I do have a quite a few I am thumbing through here or there or need a reminder of where I am in the series without having to search a few times over.

My goal is to empty the 2026- TBR collection by end of 2027.

There are various ways to do it: read the books (obvs), decide I don’t care to read the books any time soon and just send them to the limbo zone, or (probably more than I care to admit) just shunt them to the forthcoming 2027+ TBR collection.

All the while, just hoping the one day Amazon starts treating organizational behavior of its Kindles as something that can be solved with about…three or four extra flags and maybe some tags like dates. College student made music players have more sorting options than the world’s largest e-reading platform and that’s sad.

And yes, there is a non-zero chance I am just going to fill the new currently reading collection until it becomes unusable.

  1. In an echo of my recent post about being survived by our online presence, it seems that the Kindle World blog is defunct because the creator died. She has some fascinating stuff out there, still living on in her absence. ↩︎