Laptop, but in all honest I am still waiting eagerly for a good and fast enough e-ink second monitor, reading on a Kindle is such an improvement over a regular screen but the sluggishness is horrible ...
There are some tools which can turn an academic pdf (i.e. double column, images) into a nicely formatted epub/mobi file, look into it. It makes it somewhat bearable.
Agreed, an iPad with goodreader is the way to go (in particular its notetaking and extensive file management options). I might even go for the 12.9" pro model at some point but the standard 9.7" model is enough for most pdf's.
GoodReader's zoom in-out is so fast (at least on iPad Air 2), even on complex PDFs, that it's easy enough to zoom in on the occasional thing that's too small to read.
I've been thinking about upgrading to a 12.9" iPad Pro myself, but the additional benefits (larger screen, Apple Pencil support, better colour fidelity) aren't worth it for my use cases.
I tried switching from an iPad Air 2 to a 12.9" iPad Pro primarily because I wanted something larger to read PDFs with, and quickly discovered it was too large to be my iPad for everything else.
So, I'm waiting for a refresh and then I'll decide whether I can justify having two iPads.
You nailed it. Too large to casually take with me when I leave, too large/awkward to comfortably use lying down.
I don't remember whether there were other problems because it took all of 15 minutes to realize I couldn't sell my smaller iPad to help pay for it and still have an iPad to use most of the time.
their stupid idea to make it just small enough to not fit a page from a pdf, and the completely broken scrolling killed it. even tried the larger one. same problem.
they may have prevented the two people that would have read a pirated pdf of a novel instead of buying it from amazon. but it cost them the entire academia market.
It's hit or miss, but sometimes Calibre's conversions for native formats is pretty good at getting the conversion+scaling right. My partner is a chemist and she's had a lot of luck with various ACS publications rendering right after a conversion
Yeah, I have one that I loved for reading papers. My only gripe was that it gets heavy/awkward for "light" reading at night. I wound up switching to reading fiction on my phone and papers on the DX.
It really is perfect for PDFs. I'm sad they never made an updated version. I've stopped using mine as much after grad school, but I do miss it quite often.
What I need is an e-ink device that lets me take notes on it and is large and fast and shows the images in color. Zooming would make it superior to paper. It's just not there yet. I tried to read articles in NCBI's ebook format on my kindle but you can't hop back and forward easily on a Kindle and note taking is of course not an option.
Have you tried a tablet? I'm really happy with my iPad for academic paper reading. Yes, eInk is very nice, but today's tablets are good enough for reading as well. Plus, it's a different kind of reading compared to, say, a novel. I tend to read academic papers quite quickly to glean the main bits of information. For leisurely reading, paper or Kindle would be better.
I got in on the earlier pre-order and the shipping date is August. (I guess the second batch is September).
I've been in communication with the guys behind it (via email), and they seem confident of hitting their timeframe. Obviously the proof is in the pudding =).
That's very interesting. It's what the Kindle should be. It bothers me that we've had Kindle's for so long and there's been barely any real advancement in the technology — just tiny iterations.
I also use my iPad for 'academic' reading. When an epub is available, I use that with Marvin (I wish it worked with pdfs!). And for pdf's I use GoodReader. I can highly recommend both!
Oh, and for storing my pdfs and epubs I use Calibre. Also a great app.
I use my desktop for skimming a paper to determine whether it is worth reading (on a 24" portrait screen). An iPad would also work nicely there. Both are also very convenient when searching for a specific term. But if I really want to read and understand a paper, I print it out because I'll be marking all kinds of of things, making notes on the margins, and constantly referring back and forth for definitions etc. I find all of this is much easier on paper.
I find tablets and e-readers very convenient for reading things from front to back and for full-text search, but find myself resorting to paper copies for anything else.
I really wish e-ink triton was updated and deployed on a Linux (not android) tablet with a decent resolution and enough RAM to mark up PDFs, render markdown, use standard tools like git for version control and libreoffice with any other tools you wanted to install. Even a cheaper Chinese tablet but with a decent e-ink screen would be really useful but they just don't seem to exist.
You're new to HN, but as you'll find out, we don't really recommend posting jokes or wisecracks in the comments in an endeavor to keep the signal-to-noise ratio a little higher.
Mendeley app on a Macbook with a retina display. I like being able to recall something I read by searching for keywords within the parts I have highlighted.
I've been using this e-reader to read papers last semester. In short, the screen is still a bit small to read A4 sized papers without zooming, but it is actually possible, while I didn't do so with the smaller Kobo's I had before (Aura HD/H2O).
I much prefer the e-reader over a laptop (14" Thinkpad), but there are some downsides. Taking notes on the e-reader is clunky (so I don't do that), and the battery life is less than that of the earlier models (still workable, though).
The color-adjustable backlight is quite nice. The only e-reader I've seen that's better for this kind of thing is the Sony DPTS1, but then you are talking about a completely different price class.
I did, no good. It doesn't display PDFs properly. The formatting is bad and it's slow. That's the most maddening aspect, the speed is rubbish. You should be able to flip around as fast as paper but the lag is terrible.
I use a laptop mostly, but yeh paper is best because freeform annotations.
A dumb old laser printer that doesn't know I've been feeding it cheap aftermarket toner for more than 10 years.
It's not a waste of paper if paper is the most efficient way to get my work done. Paper has a large viewport and unlimited battery life, while only weighing a fraction of most electronic alternatives.
The only thing that a computer does better is searching, but this problem can be easily solved by having a PDF open on some other device as well. You don't have to choose one or the other.
Laptop when I'm at my desk, but otherwise I actually use my smartphone. It's a biggish one, and in landscape orientation it's enough to fit the (printed area of) the width of a pdf page in a decent font size.
The convenience of just taking the phone out of my pocket and start reading more than compensates for not having a whole page in view.
A Samsung Galaxy Tab S 10.5 (2015?) with Xodo PDF Reader. The screen is very good and big enough to read and highlight/comment PDF's, even for todays standards. Xodo also saves the annotations directly back to the original PDF. Using Dropsync/Dropbox for syncing with the PC.
I really tried to use a 6'' kindle for that, but it just doesn't work. I tried it with .pdf, but the screen is just to small and scrolling is not really comfortable. When I tried to convert them to .mobi with calibre, all formulas just looked nasty.
Today, I read them on my 14'' ThinkPad with Redshift installed. It does its job well, but it isn't as handy as a Kindle would be.
PPI really depends on the viewing distance. You're usually very close to a phone but much further away from a 27" monitor and further away still from a 65" TV.
I'd say for a large 13-inch ebook reader, a 167ppi grayscale display (for anti-aliasing) is pretty good.
Until very recently all ebook readers were around 167ppi (most of them 6 inches diagonally) and most people were OK with it.
The high prices are due to the eInk panels, they must have a very low yield at large sizes making them very expensive.
I agree on distance but there is a massive difference between an 8" device with 300+ PPI and one that's 224~ PPI, and if I'm getting a slightly larger device I'm going to want it as sharp as possible, it's a bit like having a 27" monitor - they look dreadful at 1080P, and I think they're only just good enough at 2160p which is generally 163 PPI - now you can really see the difference between that and a 27" 5K display at 218 PPI which lots a lot clearer.
- Zotero (https://www.zotero.org/) A software that allows you to easily keep references to academic papers right from your browser. Available as standalone app with multiple browser extension, or directly integrated into firefox. When you are on a paper's webpage, clicking on the button extracts its information, its PDF (if available) and do a capture of the webpage and store everything structured. You can then copy citation directly from zotero, generate a bibtex file, or use libreoffice extension. It also allow to sync between computer up to 300M, and extending the storage is quite cheap.
- Zotfile (https://github.com/jlegewie/zotfile) An Zotero extension that monitor the download folder to let you attach downloaded PDF to existing entries. It also rename PDFs with the pattern you want. And the killer feature: It is able to extract what you electronically annotated on the PDF (Highlights, comments)!!
- Okular (https://okular.kde.org/) For reading and annotating PDF. Straightforward use, nice annotations tools (F6 to open, double click items to make them permanent). Ctrl-S to save the annotation to file (otherwise stored somewhere in the user home file).
All these are open source software and are available on Linux!
I also use Zotero, and use Box.Com for storage/syncing. Zotfile is a wonderful addon.
I use Zotero in conjunction with Papership (http://www.papershipapp.com) on an iPad. Papership syncs with WebDAV storage, which means that, after syncing, downloaded PDFs are available on your iPad for reading offline. Any annotations are pushed back and available in the Zotero client. It's a great client and really stable. In conjunction with the Apple Pencil, it's a really nice system.
I'd advise an iPad Pro 12.9" if you do a lot of reading. The extra size means that you spend less time zooming in and out, and an app like Liquid Text (http://liquidtext.net) comes into its own for bringing text and figures into the same region of the screen and reduce the amount of time you spend flipping between the two.
So if I understand you right, for syncing your bibliography you changed the "Data Directory Location" to a synced Box folder (a dropbox-like system)? I thought about doing so with owncloud, then I decided that paying when I reach the syncing limit would be a nice way to encourage the project.
Papership and LiquidText looks really nice, I would love to see such applications for Android. But I presume Apple is a more interesting platform as many researchers are on MacBooks. I suppose this is because researchers have really few spare free time and they don't want to use it fighting against the (linux) machines.
That might be part of it. Myself I value most the differences in hardware: I used a Samsung Galaxy Note at first for similar tasks and loved it, using Zotfile and Dropsync for keeping PDFs on the tablet. I travel a lot, and I couldn't count on it getting through a day of mixed use. In the end, the excellent power management of the iPad was a big advantage.
Similarly, I made the switch to a Macbook Pro after a bad day in 2011 in which I was first unable to connect my (Linux) laptop to a projector when visiting an institute to give a talk, and then unable to Skype in to a conference call. It was a bad morning, away from base, so I went to the Apple shop at lunchtime. I value the Linux box I use at work, and enjoy working with its tools, but easy collaboration is also important to me.
I have taken ReadCube into consideration, but quickly dismissed it because A) there is not Linux support [1]; and B) it is not open source.
The open-source side is important for me because the data accumulated in these software is really valuable. If one day the company has to close, you may be stuck without access to your data. With open-source software I'm at least sure to be able to continue running the latest software version on my own, and a community can start to take over and maintain it. Also the way data are stored in the computer can be deduced/found in the code, allowing to make exportation/importation to other software easier. I don't mind to pay for a good software – like I'll probably do with zotero for storage when I'll hit the memory limit – but it has to be open-source.
Except this the concept looks quite interesting and the UI seems nice. The only additional feature (in regard to my setup) that I can see on the homepage is the recommendation system, that can be quite interesting though.
If you want to sync larger Zotero libraries for free between computers you can use SyncThing to sync the libraries and then let Zotero sync up the database. SyncThing isn't cloud based, so your machines have to be on at the same time, but otherwise it works great.
Print out onto paper, then I can read it anywhere, annotate it and file it away if I will need it for future work. I vastly prefer it to reading on a screen.
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[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 281 ms ] thread1. The screen size is too small for a readable, fit-to-screen experience
2. Scrolling is too sluggish to even try, you don't want to scroll horizontally and vertically on a PDF which is zoomed a few levels
Currently, laptop works much better I'd say.
I've been thinking about upgrading to a 12.9" iPad Pro myself, but the additional benefits (larger screen, Apple Pencil support, better colour fidelity) aren't worth it for my use cases.
So, I'm waiting for a refresh and then I'll decide whether I can justify having two iPads.
Because it's too large to carry around all the time, or because it's not comfortable to use when lying down, or something else?
I don't remember whether there were other problems because it took all of 15 minutes to realize I couldn't sell my smaller iPad to help pay for it and still have an iPad to use most of the time.
their stupid idea to make it just small enough to not fit a page from a pdf, and the completely broken scrolling killed it. even tried the larger one. same problem.
they may have prevented the two people that would have read a pirated pdf of a novel instead of buying it from amazon. but it cost them the entire academia market.
One day its battery is going to die, and I have no idea what I'll do then.
It really is perfect for PDFs. I'm sad they never made an updated version. I've stopped using mine as much after grad school, but I do miss it quite often.
I only wish it had pen support (surface). If I could markup papers as I go with my pen it would be the ultimate tool.
What I need is an e-ink device that lets me take notes on it and is large and fast and shows the images in color. Zooming would make it superior to paper. It's just not there yet. I tried to read articles in NCBI's ebook format on my kindle but you can't hop back and forward easily on a Kindle and note taking is of course not an option.
Sounds interesting, but for $420 I doubt it would pay off compared to printing (black&white anyway).
If the stylus is as real-time as they claim (input latency of 55 ms) - it's basically my holy grail device - e-ink that is just like real paper.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34I27KPZM6g
Device is shown with drawing on it at 0:41.
I've been in communication with the guys behind it (via email), and they seem confident of hitting their timeframe. Obviously the proof is in the pudding =).
Oh, and for storing my pdfs and epubs I use Calibre. Also a great app.
I find tablets and e-readers very convenient for reading things from front to back and for full-text search, but find myself resorting to paper copies for anything else.
I much prefer the e-reader over a laptop (14" Thinkpad), but there are some downsides. Taking notes on the e-reader is clunky (so I don't do that), and the battery life is less than that of the earlier models (still workable, though).
The color-adjustable backlight is quite nice. The only e-reader I've seen that's better for this kind of thing is the Sony DPTS1, but then you are talking about a completely different price class.
I use a laptop mostly, but yeh paper is best because freeform annotations.
It's not a waste of paper if paper is the most efficient way to get my work done. Paper has a large viewport and unlimited battery life, while only weighing a fraction of most electronic alternatives.
The only thing that a computer does better is searching, but this problem can be easily solved by having a PDF open on some other device as well. You don't have to choose one or the other.
The convenience of just taking the phone out of my pocket and start reading more than compensates for not having a whole page in view.
(If you know f.lux, it's an open source version of that)
I really like the idea and hope that it takes off when they release it, hopefully scale could make them cheaper.
I'd say for a large 13-inch ebook reader, a 167ppi grayscale display (for anti-aliasing) is pretty good.
Until very recently all ebook readers were around 167ppi (most of them 6 inches diagonally) and most people were OK with it.
The high prices are due to the eInk panels, they must have a very low yield at large sizes making them very expensive.
The setup on my laptop:
- Zotero (https://www.zotero.org/) A software that allows you to easily keep references to academic papers right from your browser. Available as standalone app with multiple browser extension, or directly integrated into firefox. When you are on a paper's webpage, clicking on the button extracts its information, its PDF (if available) and do a capture of the webpage and store everything structured. You can then copy citation directly from zotero, generate a bibtex file, or use libreoffice extension. It also allow to sync between computer up to 300M, and extending the storage is quite cheap.
- Zotfile (https://github.com/jlegewie/zotfile) An Zotero extension that monitor the download folder to let you attach downloaded PDF to existing entries. It also rename PDFs with the pattern you want. And the killer feature: It is able to extract what you electronically annotated on the PDF (Highlights, comments)!!
- Okular (https://okular.kde.org/) For reading and annotating PDF. Straightforward use, nice annotations tools (F6 to open, double click items to make them permanent). Ctrl-S to save the annotation to file (otherwise stored somewhere in the user home file).
All these are open source software and are available on Linux!
I use Zotero in conjunction with Papership (http://www.papershipapp.com) on an iPad. Papership syncs with WebDAV storage, which means that, after syncing, downloaded PDFs are available on your iPad for reading offline. Any annotations are pushed back and available in the Zotero client. It's a great client and really stable. In conjunction with the Apple Pencil, it's a really nice system.
I'd advise an iPad Pro 12.9" if you do a lot of reading. The extra size means that you spend less time zooming in and out, and an app like Liquid Text (http://liquidtext.net) comes into its own for bringing text and figures into the same region of the screen and reduce the amount of time you spend flipping between the two.
Papership and LiquidText looks really nice, I would love to see such applications for Android. But I presume Apple is a more interesting platform as many researchers are on MacBooks. I suppose this is because researchers have really few spare free time and they don't want to use it fighting against the (linux) machines.
Similarly, I made the switch to a Macbook Pro after a bad day in 2011 in which I was first unable to connect my (Linux) laptop to a projector when visiting an institute to give a talk, and then unable to Skype in to a conference call. It was a bad morning, away from base, so I went to the Apple shop at lunchtime. I value the Linux box I use at work, and enjoy working with its tools, but easy collaboration is also important to me.
Need to get some system in place as my hard-drive is becoming littered with cryptically named PDF files.
The open-source side is important for me because the data accumulated in these software is really valuable. If one day the company has to close, you may be stuck without access to your data. With open-source software I'm at least sure to be able to continue running the latest software version on my own, and a community can start to take over and maintain it. Also the way data are stored in the computer can be deduced/found in the code, allowing to make exportation/importation to other software easier. I don't mind to pay for a good software – like I'll probably do with zotero for storage when I'll hit the memory limit – but it has to be open-source.
Except this the concept looks quite interesting and the UI seems nice. The only additional feature (in regard to my setup) that I can see on the homepage is the recommendation system, that can be quite interesting though.
[1] http://support.readcube.com/knowledgebase/articles/242873-ca...
I posted instructions on the Zotero forums a while back: https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/50191/syncing-zotero-wi...
«I thought about doing so with owncloud, then I decided that paying when I reach the syncing limit would be a nice way to encourage the project.»