I’ve got nine ten physical books sitting on my desk to read as preparation for interviews. I’ve got three more sitting on my Kindle that need to be read within the next six days. I’m in the middle of four books that I’m reading purely for pleasure and three other non-fiction books that I’m reading for educational purposes.

That’s nineteen books that I’m either reading, or will soon be reading. That doesn’t count all of the books I’ve purchased electronically over the past three months that I haven’t even been able to start yet.

Last night I spent time reading four different books. Why? So I can keep the story lines in mind.

I love reading, but this is getting out of control. I’m reading books by authors whose work I adore and treating the reading as a task, rather than a pleasure.

I love reading and have tremendous respect for the amazing authors who create the characters and worlds that we as readers want to keep visiting. But, I can’t help but feel as though I’m doing them a disservice by allowing my reading focus to become so fractured.

The solution? Get my books, both physical and digital organized in such a way that my reading ADD becomes more difficult to feed. Instead of opening one of my Kindles and seeing hundreds of choices. Open it and see three. One non-fiction, one book that I’m reading as interview prep, and one book that I’m reading purely for pleasure.

The easiest way of doing this would be to use some kind of web app from Amazon (my e-reader of choice) to organize all of my digital books, across various Kindles. But, to the best of my knowledge there is no such app. It’s possible to organize collections of books on your Kindles, but those collections are device specific. I use both a Kindle Fire and a Kindle Paperwhite, so that isn’t a good long term solution for me.

I’ve read about people who’ve successfully used the Goodreads To Be Read list to organize this kind of reading, but that too requires manually entering your books and organizing them.

Amazon already has all of my E-Books in their database. Why the heck can’t I use that database to organize books on the different devices? Come on Amazon. Making it easier to read across multiple devices is one of your strengths. Why not expand that to making it easier to organize over multiple devices?

I’m going to try using Goodreads to organize my reading for now, but I sure would like a less manual solution. If anybody knows of one will you please let me know?

Creative Commons Image by Kristin Nador