Kindle 3 and academic reading

For my thesis, research and studies I need to read a lot of articles. Most of these are on my computer as PDFs. For some time I have been longing to have a device that would allow me to read these PDFs on the go and thus utilize the various transfer times I have. Sure, I could print them out and take the hard copy. But for ecological and practical reasons, I now read almost everything electronically. Usually, when I read a paper, I will highlight the content or write down a few notes. Now if I have done this on my printed copy, where is this copy going to be the next time I need it? Most probably not with me. So I needed a device that would allow me to take my PDFs with me, read them conveniently, make a few highlights or notes and transfer the lot back to my computer. I had a very close brush with the iPad and I have finally chosen the new Kindle 3. After much waiting and a struggle with my old nemesis, the UPS, I finally held it in my hands. And this is what I think of it:

Reading PDFs

The Kindles have been (as far as I can see rightfully) praised for offering great experience with reading e-books. The experience I have with reading academic papers in PDFs can be described as satisfactory. The Kindle 3 screen offers great contrast and the e-paper rests the eyes. The PDFs are shown just as they would be in a PDF reader on a computer. However, the screen is fairly small, so depending on the format of the PDF (e.g. the number of columns), you have to flip the screen or zoom in for the actual reading. I find the page-fit view sufficient for skimming, though. The navigation is good.

Annotation

You can highlight passages of text and add notes. For this, you have to navigate on the screen with the 5-way controller. This is of course not as convenient as a mouse. Also, when highlighting text in papers with more than one columns, the highlight does not break at the column end, but continues across the page, so you will have to break such highlight into several short ones (a problem I know also from other PDF readers). For writing notes, you have to use the fairly small keybord. The highlighted text and notes are not embedded into the PDF but stored in a separate TXT file.

Organisation

The Kindle allows the creation of collections to organise the documents. Also, you can create folders when copying documents onto the Kindle. This makes it easy to find documents both when reading on the Kindle and when it is plugged to the computer. But these are two separate things – creating a new folder will not create a new collection.

Workflow

I have figured out a workflow to incorporate the Kindle into my reading. I use a “To read” folder on my computer, where I put unread documents. These are papers from new journal issues, papers recommended to me by others, papers I found randomly on the web, etc. To this, I have added the folder “Read”, where I put papers I am already done with. This organisation is mirrored by the collections and folders on Kindle. I move the papers from “To read” to my Kindle and place them in the “To read” collection. Then I read them while on the bus or at home etc. I highlight what I need and make brief notes. Read documents that I want to keep lend in the “Read” collection and those that I consider irrelevant are directly deleted. Then I move the read documents back to my computer, together with a copy of the TXT with my notes and highlights. I then put the papers into my reference manager (Mendeley), sort them, add the meta-data and copy the notes I have made on Kindle from the TXT-file into the “Comments” field for the particular paper. This way, the notes remain available to me independent of the PDF. That’s it.

Conclusions

I am satisfied with the Kindle 3. It can do what I have expected it to do. Of course colour, touch screen and larger screen would be nice. But then I knew it had a black-and-white, 6-inch non-touch screen before I bought it – so while start whining now? When deciding to buy the Kindle 3 for academic reading, you ought to be aware of the limitations and think carefully about what you want it to do. The way I use it is very simple. It is enough for me, but if you want more, you have to look at another device. The iPad is definitely an option, where you could do stuff like automatically syncing between several devices etc. I have decided against it in the end, because of the price (yes, you get more for more money, but I didn’t want to surf with it, I just needed it for reading, so the added value was not worth the added price), the battery-time and the reading properties (I do a lot of reading on the computer and I am beginning to feel the strain – Kindle’ screen is really better here). If you have time and patience, you can also wait a bit, because the market is going to be flooded with further e-readers and tablets very soon.

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