That’s what Jan of The Kindle Reader is going to do. Very clever!
Here’s a little bit of what she has to say:
Most libraries in this country use either the Dewey Decimal Classification (mainly public libraries) or the Library of Congress Classification (academic and some large public libraries.) The LC classification is much more detailed than the Dewey as befits its goal of arranging a large number of books in logical order on the shelves of research libraries. For the purposes of my relatively small Kindle library, I think the DDC might work better. It classifies books into broad subject fields and can be supplemented by special collections for the genres I read.
Go over to her blog to see how she intends to do it. It seems like a pretty good idea to me. By the way, that’s Dewey’s picture, not Jan’s.
It seems to me that both of those systems are better-suited to non-fiction than to fiction, while most people’s e-book collections probably lean heavily toward fiction.
One could also choose to go with the BISAC coding, which has somewhat detailed fiction and juvenile fiction subcategories.
But somehow, I’d think that for a Kindle it’d just be easier to use Amazon’s classification system. Then you wouldn’t have to put any thought into how to classify a particular e-book: just see how Amazon did it and follow suit.