I was an early convert to the electronic book format.
It kind of surprised me because I have always been a bit of a book hoarder; one who struggles to loan out a book for fear of never seeing it again. I love my books. I love looking at them on their shelves in dust jackets of different colors and fonts. I love pulling one down and reading the jacket flap and fondly remembering the characters.
During the twelve years we lived on the road, we rented a storage locker to give my library a temporary home. When we bought our house and settled down, the best part for me was unpacking all of my old friends and arranging them in their new bookcases. Some still had to remain in boxes in the garage when I ran out of shelves. For those lonely garage dwellers their names and authors were listed in a spreadsheet on my computer so that they wouldn't be completely forgotten.
As time went on and Amazon came into my life in 1996 (did you know they used to send early customers, like myself, travel coffee mugs and then bookmarks?) I realized that I would have to part with some of these treasures and I painfully culled from my library those books that would go to the local Friends of the Library for their semi-annual book sales.
But even the semi-annual thinning wasn't enough, and finally, in May of 2009, I struck a bargain with my husband. He could either build an addition onto the house for a library or he could buy me one of the new kindles, the DX with the large screen. I fell in love with my new electronic reader that allowed me to travel to the dentist or to the Caribbean with my library at hand.
When my brother was hospitalized with cancer and too weak to hold a book, we got a smaller kindle for him and put it on our Amazon account since we had similar reading tastes. After his death I introduced my husband to the joys of e-books as he took over the larger DX and I kept my brother's kindle.
Currently, the DX is now in the hands of our great-grandson (age 14) and another kindle is with my stepdaughter in Chicago, and along with mine, they are all on the same Amazon account that currently has 550 books. I shop sales, including the Kindle Daily Deal, and I loaded up on free classics, especially in the beginning.
And that is where the problem arises.
Although it can hold over 3000 books, the kindle only lists the title and the author of a book. You can organize by either, or by the most recently viewed book. You can establish "collections" on the kindle but you can't archive the collection. Or at least you couldn't when I first began using the collection feature. I gave up on it very early as being almost useless.
So now I have 550 books without a single dust jacket.
For me that is a problem. I can't hold in my memory the name of every book I have ever read, much less the story and characters. And if I can't do it, what chance does Keenan or Gail have at knowing what a book is about by the title alone? There is not even a publication date, so I can't tell which of the six Karin Fossum titles I bought at $1.99 a pop comes first in the series.
Yes, you can use the menu to go to a description of the book, but that requires waiting an eternity for the kindle store to load. If you have a wi/fi only device and are out of range, you can't even get that much.
So I decided I needed some type of book log or journal to help me keep track of what the books we owned were about. I wanted the log to contain the author's name, the title, publication date, genre and brief description. I wanted it to become my electronic dust jacket.
I started with the simplest format, the Google Docs spreadsheet. (And thank you ever so much, Mnemosyne, for introducing me to Google Drive.)
Click image to enlarge
Yes, Excel or Numbers would have worked as well, but I wanted it to be accessible to members of my family in Nevada and Illinois. Using an online system means anyone could read it from anywhere.
But I didn't really like the spreadsheet format. I wanted to find a system that would produce an index card catalogue that could be searched by genre, title or author's name. So I started looking online for templates. And found a lot for grade schoolers.
Not so many for adult readers, and none of them had the database qualities that I really was looking for. Years ago I took classes in Windows Access and really enjoyed using it to produce a recipe book that could develop complete weekly menus and shopping lists. And then I got a Mac. And a program that nicely handled recipes.
Online dust jackets can be found at Goodreads.com and librarything.com, both of which I use although I prefer Goodreads. It is the first one I signed up for and learned how to use so it is easier for me although if I had started at library thing that would probably be my favorite. As it stands, I am less familiar with Library thing but did manage to break their system when I uploaded my list from Goodreads. Don't know how I did it, but they fixed it so it is back and running. Since then I have been a little tentative in my activities there. But here is my homepage:
Click image to enlarge
Here is a screenshot of My Books page at Goodreads:
Click image to enlarge
And clicking on a book title for which I have written a review will bring up this page:
Click image to enlarge
Goodreads allows the users to set up their own bookshelves. I have one for some of my favorite reading subjects, like histories, biographies and politics. Adding a bookshelf for e-books is a simple matter, and then I can go through the "My Books" and adding that shelf to those books that are on my kindle.
A nice feature of Goodreads is that just typing the name or ISBN into the search engine brings up a page like this:
Click image to enlarge
From that page I can click on the button that says "add to my books." Then I can add it to my shelf "to-read," "read," or "currently-reading" and any of the other shelves. And it is done. The book, and its description, is added to whatever shelves I want it to go on. A book, of course, can be on multiple shelves.
From there, it is a simple matter to send the URL to family members so that they can visit the site and browse the books that are on our shared kindle account. After spending a week looking at the alternatives, this seems to be the easiest for me to use.
What do you use? How do you keep track of your reading? Do you keep a long-hand list in a formal journal? Index Cards? Digital list?
Readers & Book Lovers Series Schedule