Two New Features I Need for My Kindle

I’ve been using an e-reader for over a decade now, and using an actual Kindle for around 7 of those years. In that time, my book collection has grown a lot. It came to me yesterday that there are two features which would be quite simple to implement, which would make massive improvements to my Kindle quality of life.

Archive Books

Before owning a Kindle, back in the days when I read traditional books, I used to hoard. I had eight bookshelves in my lounge, plus some books in smaller floor units. Any books that I had either finished or had no intention of reading any time soon went into boxes in the loft.

Browsing 3000+ books on my Kindle, I find there is a lot of stuff I’ve no intention of reading any time soon, and they get in the way of me seeing the books I really do want to read.

For example, I did some gardening on a farm a decade ago, and I bought some reference ebooks to help me out. I really don’t need those books right now, but I don’t want to get rid of them. So, it would really help to be able to archive them to keep them out of sight, but to have them still there should I ever want to refer back to them.

So, I know that I could download all my books, and then browse through just the ones downloaded. Yes, this would work, but it’s clunky, and the same titles downloaded to my Kindle Paperwhite, would not be the same ones downloaded on my Kindle for Android. Plus, if for whatever reason, I needed to reset my Kindle, or if I bought a new one, I’d have to go through the process of downloading them all again.

Also, I may not have enough storage for most of my library to be on the device itself, and maybe I don’t even want to download all my books.

Being able to send books to an archive would free up my virtual shelf, saving me the time of scrolling through looking for my next book. Physical shelves are easy to browse, it should be the same for the Kindle.

Sort By Progress

I use my Kindle like Netflix, jumping around from book to book, rather than just working through one or two at a time. I can’t help it. I read in so many different areas that some days I fancy a bit of this, and others I fancy a bit of that. I seldom buy a book and read it. Instead, I buy a book I think I’ll want to read at some point whilst reading whatever else I’ve got on the go.

I started browsing my collection from least to most recent yesterday and stumbled across so many books I was in the middle of reading last year, that after getting new books, had gotten pushed lower and lower down the list until I forgot about them.

So what I really could do with is a ‘sort by progress’ feature. I could then see which books I’d barely started, which were half way through, and which I’d nearly finished — and actually finish them!

Whether Amazon will ever actually implement these features, who knows. Feature updates have been thin on the ground and not particularly innovative, but I can but hope.