Monday, November 7, 2011

We Need A Better Way to Manage Content

When the Kindle first arrived there was no way to create groups. Every book, newspaper or magazine just got plopped onto the home screen. As a result, everyone's home screen quickly turned into many home screens and you had to flip through page after page to find what you're looking for.

Fast forward to today where we now have the ability to create Collections. Terrific. It's 2011 and the state-of-the-art Kindle content organization technique is something MS-DOS supported way back in the 1980's. Can't we do better than this?

Here's my problem. I'm constantly downloading samples and buying new ebooks. I also have subscriptions to a couple of magazines on my Kindle. There's so much stuff piling up that I can't remember what I wanted to read next. In short, there's no way to prioritize my Kindle reading list!

In the old days I'd just stack my books on my desk or nightstand and I'd make sure the important ones were on top. That works when you're only reading 3 or 4 books at a time, but what happens when you're juggling a half dozen or more as well as thinking about reading any one of 10+ samples? The current model breaks down.

Here's one simple solution: How about automatically pouring all of my samples into a Samples Collection? That would be pretty easy and I'll be Amazon could code that up in no time. Or how about this?: Let me assign a priority to each of the books, magazines, samples, etc., that I download. Then let me sort my library by priority. Even better!

I'm sure a great user interface designer could come up with a variety of solutions to this problem. I hope they do it soon because I keep losing track of what I want to read next!

1 comments:

Carole said...

I like your suggestions.

Meanwhile I just have a TBR collection and put books there that I know I want to read soon.