Managing my student Kindles

 I have six Kindles in my classroom (thank you, donors!), and my students love them. They read much more now, and they take care of the devices.

Managing my Kindle library, however, is not easy.

There are two things that make things difficult:

1. I get books from a variety of sources: Amazon, Project Gutenberg, the public library, and more.

2. It’s not easy to organize your books (especially into collections) from Amazon’s Manage Your Kindle page.

My goals this year are to expand my Kindle e-book collection (from 75 current titles) and to get better at managing it without too much stress.

To do so, I’m using Calibre to house my collection and Kindle Collection Manager to organize my books.

Here’s what I’ve done so far:

1. I’ve aggregated all my books into my Calibre library.

2. I’ve made a “master Kindle” with Kindle Collection Manager, which places all the books into the right collections.

From now on, this is what I will do:

1. When I get a new book, I will immediately move it to my Calibre library.

2. Then, I’ll share it with the six student Kindles over email. Note: This sometimes doesn’t work, but I don’t want to collect Kindles from students every time I get a new book. I’ll have to think about this more.

This process will ensure that all student Kindles have all the books, but it won’t automatically organize the new books into the right collections. There is no instant way that I know of to do this, so unless I figure out something, I’ll need to periodically sync up the Kindles.

I must say, this is a bit annoying to me. I wish things were easier. Of course, I’m really appreciative that I have these Kindles in the first place!

Do you have ideas about how to make this process easier? Please let me know! 

What do you think?