Taking Advantage of Your Kindle

I've my Kindle2 now for nearly 18 months and I have a few tips to pass on.
I'm presuming that these also hold good for the latest, the Kindle3.

These are features that I use a lot.

Collections/categories

Organising your books into collections is far better than listing your books in alphabetical order of title or author, or by "most recent."
Straight lists make it hard to find books and to know what you've read and what you haven't read.

Each book goes into just one collection on my Kindle.

Here are some of the collections I have.

• now reading - one book goes into here
• TBRN - to be read next, for those books I really have to tackle soon
• special collections such as - historical, vintage, British, Nordic, global reading challenge, Agatha Christie, review books
• completed - as I complete reading a book I move it into here and remove it from all other collections
• TBR - any book not in another collection goes into here

 How to do it

Sound

Somewhere I read just recently a suggestion that if you were anxious to finish a book on your Kindle but were unable to use your eyes, e.g. when you are driving the car, then you could use the Text-reader and listen.

Not all books come with a text-reader option - apparently that is something the publisher had to agree to - and if you can turn it on, it is a computer-generated voice. As you listen it auto-turns the page.

Still, it is not bad. You can plug some head phones in and listen too. If the volume is a bit low, there is a regulator on the right hand side of the Kindle. Be aware that it will run the battery down more qucikly.

Notes, Highlights and BookMarks

I have begun using my notes and bookmarks when I create my book reviews.
You can highlight bits of text you want to include in your book review and add notes too.
When you read them over they serve to remind you of salient parts of the story.

When you connect your Kindle to your computer, it is treated as an extra drive.
Look for My Clippings. This is a text file and you can open it with a simple word processor like Notepad.
The highlights and notes from your most recent book will be at the end of the document.
I select the text I want and then transfer it into another text document and then manipulate it from there.
Check my most recent review, and you'll see how I used a bit of text that I had stored in my highlights.

So I hope these pointers are handy.