Classifying Books on Your Kindle Using the Dewey Decimal System

Those of us who purchased the first Kindle in 2007 had no simple way to arrange books by subject on our new e-reader. Owner-created collections were first added to the Kindle 2 and DX relatively recently with the latest software 2.5 update. As this feature should be of great interest to a whole new generation of Kindle readers who are buying the Kindle 3, it might be a good idea to review how it works. The collections feature allows you to group your library by subjects that you choose yourself.

So how do you do it?

1. From the home screen, push the menu button.

2. Using the 5-way controller, underline Create New Collection.

3. Type in a name for your collection.

4. Save the collection by choosing save with the 5-way controller. The new collection will appear at the top of your home screen.

5. To add books to a collection, with the 5-way controller, go to the title of the book and push the 5-way controller to the right. On the menu that appears, click on add to collection. Scroll to a collection you wish to assign the book to and click on add to this collection.

6. Repeat until you're sick of classifying books and would rather be reading. Go back to the home screen to start doing just that.



Please note that you can add a book to as many collections as you like. Unfortunately newspapers, magazines and blog cannot be put into collections so they just hang around on your Kindle waiting for Amazon to create this capability to a future software release.

Soon a brand new Kindle will be arriving at my home. Hoping to avoid the hundreds of screens of unorganized titles I've suffered with in past e-readers, I'm planning to get a good start to using the collections feature with the Kindle 3 from the start, basing my collections on that old library standby, the Dewey Decimal Classification system.

Most brick and mortar libraries in this country use either the Dewey Decimal Classification (mainly public libraries) or the Library of Congress Classification (academic and some large public libraries. The LC classification is much more detailed than the Dewey as befits its goal of arranging a large number of books in logical order on the shelves of research libraries. For the purposes of my relatively small Kindle library, I think the DDC might work better. It classifies books into broad subject fields and can be supplemented by special collections for the genres I read.

Here's the way Dewey does it:

000 - Computer science, information & general works
100 - Philosophy and psychology
200 - Religion
300 - Social sciences
400 - Language
500 - Science and mathematics
600 - Technology
700 - Arts and recreation
800 - Literature
900 - History, geography, biography and autobiography

My collections - loosely based on Dewey - will include:

Computer & Information Science
Philosophy, Psychology, Religion
Social Sciences
Language
Science, Math
Art, Music & Crafts
Literature
History,Geography, Travel
Biography
Books About Books
Reference Books
Short Stories
Sci-Fi & Fantasy
Mysteries & Thrillers
Freebies
Samples

I'm combining the technology category with science & mathematics and adding some special collections that reflect my reading tastes. Freebies go in a separate collection because in some cases - a long time after acquiring a book - I ask myself why I ever bought it. I can't resist those free samples so just having the samples all together is a real plus.

The nice thing about collections is that you can change them as you go along. Removing a book from a collection does not remove it from your Kindle.

For more information about the DDC, you might want to check out this informative article: What's So Great About the Dewey Decimal System?