Kindle Library Warning!

I've created a nightmare! I've been downloading free Kindle books like crazy the past few months and had nearly 200 in my library. Great - so now I have ebook clutter to go with the rest of the clutter in my life, which I want to clean up not add to...

Anyway, fair warning - when downloading Kindle books, follow the one in, one out rule before it's too late and you have dozens of pages with 15 books each with no rhyme or reason. Sure, you can sort by date and author, but if there's a way to categorize the online library, I sure can't find it.

But won't my books be lost?

The short answer is no. What I did discover in all my searching for a way to organize my unwieldy online library is that deleting books there does not affect what's already on my Kindle for PC or my ereader. All it does is prevent me from re-downloading the books to one of my devices (unless I buy the deleted title again, of course).

I LOVE Amazon but...

Seems there should be a better way to manage my Kindle library online. I love that Amazon provides all this free so I am not complaining but it would be nice if there were a way to categorize books in the online library and an easier way to delete titles.

As near as I can tell, and I've looked so if I missed something PLEASE let me know, there is no way to actually organize the books in the online library. With Kindle for PC, I can create "collections" and group like titles together, like cookbooks, fiction, crafts, etc. I'm not sure about the actual Kindle ereader as I have a Cruz with the Kindle app and don't seem to have any organizing options there.

Deleting books is cumbersome.

But the biggest problem with the online library is that deleting unwanted titles is so darn cumbersome. You'd think there'd be a check box by each book that then allowed you to delete multiple books at one time. But there's isn't. Not only that, when you do delete a title, instead of taking you back to the same place in your library, you go back to the beginning and have to navigate through by page or re-sort by date or author. All this wouldn't be a problem if I had caught on earlier and implemented the one in, one out rule. But trying to go through and delete titles one by one when they're scattered across 13 pages takes a LOT of time.

One in, one out...

So from now on, I'm going to delete books as I download more. Maybe not one for one, but close. In the meantime, I'll keep plugging away at getting my current mess cleaned up. I'm down to just over 100 titles now so have made some progress. There are several books, like the dictionary and user guide, that I will never delete. But I sure don't need multiple copies of read-once-only fiction cluttering up my life. After all, one of the reasons I switched to ebooks is to cut clutter.