I was an early adopter of ebook technology, purchasing one of the first electronic readers out there: the Rocket Ebook. But it took Amazon, with the power of all those books, to make ebooks a real thing.
I was also an early adopter of the Kindle. I bought a second generation DX in 2009 when it became clear that Amazon was going to crack open the market – something NuvoMedia had never managed to do.
And because I was an early adopter, I’ve bought a lot of Kindle books from Amazon over the years.
So Many Books
I’ve been buying books since 2009. That’s a whole lot of books. And while writing a recent article on backlogs, I realized that I have built up a huge backlog of unread books on my Kindle.
How many, exactly? Well, there’s no easy way to tell.
Because Amazon doesn’t have a way to export your purchased book lists from their system.
Once A Programmer…
One of the side effects of being a programmer is that I will put my skills to use to solve annoyances in my life. It’s just what I do.
So I wrote a way to get the books from Amazon into a nice neat list.
What, People Could Use This?
I never consider that the stuff I write for myself could possibly be useful for others. I don’t know why. But all the utilities and solutions I have programmed over the years to solve my own annoyances have stayed on my hard drive.
A friend of mine called me while I was writing the solution to the Kindle program and asked me what I was doing. Her response? Not to make fun of me for being an ultra-geek, but to say, “Oh, I could use that too!”
Want the Solution?
I have made a spreadsheet to help you keep your Kindle Inventory. It’s free in my shop.
