I have been wanting a file of the titles, authors and dates of purchase of my Kindle books. I had heard before of Calibre, a program that works with ebooks but today I learned about Kindlian, a different program. I paid $20 to download the program and used it to make a file of just the titles and authors of the 40 books I arbitrarily selected from my recent Kindle buys.
I wanted to call a halt to further buying and look at some of the recent ones to see what I thought of them. This is similar to going to the library and selecting some books to take home and exam at leisure. When I do that, I sometimes get right into concentrating on one or two of the selection and wind up returning books that I haven't gotten around to reading or even looking at. Often, the books I borrow are from the New Books shelf and they have usually been selected by a librarian for purchase. So, there are several steps between the writing of the book and my getting around to reading it.
In this case, which is something of new approach for me, I was aware that quite a few new books had seemed worth buying. If a book sounds valuable and costs two or three dollars, I often buy it. If the price is 12 to 14 dollars, I may buy it. But as time goes by, I can acquire a book, forget about it or even get started in it and then be distracted by later purchases and never get back to it. An author can get repetitious or move into areas or explanations I am not interested in. I am not obliged to complete a book I don't want to finish, especially when good competing material is waiting just a tap away.
When I realized I had bought quite a few lately without even opening any of them, I resolved to go through the index of a Kindle and add the titles that seemed too good to miss into a single "collection". I kept adding until I got back to books that seemed older and more familiar. I didn't use any very logical or professional standard for what got added or skipped nor when I stopped adding to the collection.
The Kindlian software made it rather quick and easy to get a list of what turned out to be 40 books' titles and authors. I could make 50 more such collections with the books I already have (N>2000). I found that the Kindle and the Kindlian don't alphabetize titles in exactly the same way, the biggest difference being whether something like "The Method" is in the M's and "The" is ignored or it is in the T's by using "The" as the first word. I wanted to try and get the whole set into one list. I am reasonably satisfied with the result, which can be seen here:
https://sites.google.com/site/kirbyvariety/the-forty-being-looked-at
