Any grad students out there use a Kindle? Nook Color? Something else for PDFs?

[scootermaster]

So, I'm finishing my dissertation, and I have hundreds and hundreds of PDFs and their accompanying printouts. I was thinking that it'd be nice to have them all in once place. I'm assuming there are a lot of other people in similar boats.

I'm mostly wondering what people's experiences were with those sorts of things. Right now I use BibDesk (think Papers, if you don't know what that is) to handle meta-data and bibliographic information. Obviously a Kindle won't sync with that (good lord I'd jizz if it could!) but I'm just wondering what students (who have to worry about bibliographic information) use as a workflow and what they'd suggest (Kindle, Nook Color, iPad, something else entirely).

I've also never even held a Kindle, so I'd have to do that, obviously. Are they going to update it soon? The only tablet I know anything about is the iPad, so, um, yeah. Help!?

 

[Gigantopithecus]

E. None of the above.

I'm in the same spot as you. (Though hundreds of PDFs? Surely you meant thousands? ) Neither the 3rd gen Kindle nor Nook Color display PDFs acceptably. The iPad has a number of good PDF readers but AFAIK it doesn't sync with Papers.

That's why I use a laptop for PDF reading.

 

[Belegost]

Laptop. Though I just grabbed one of the touchpads, and for just reading it's nice. However, archiving, correlating and referencing is done on my laptop. Backed up to my desktop, and my fiancee's desktop, and an external drive.

 

[ew915]

PDF looks bad on the kindle but on the DX looks decent.

 

[Pliablemoose]

Send Kaido a pm, http://forums.anandtech.com/private.php?do=newpm&u=128051

IIRC, he uses an iPad for that or a notebook, has a pretty cool system figured out, to the point of razoring apart his texts, scanning them and using Kinko's(?) to scan to PDF's and rebind the books for him.

 

[Tu]

Just a laptop. I find it easier to write while working with references, reading articles, and finding specific articles or using a reference manager. I use a laptop stand, mechanical switch keyboard, wireless mouse, and large secondary monitor when I can.

 

[Imp]

Tried using my Playbook for PDFs. Wasn't bad, just didn't fit the whole screen and I had to keep scrolling. I also couldn't highlight stuff and write notes as casually as with a pencil, so no good there.

The most I ever have is 100 to 200 pages of Powerpoints and/or PDFs, and I get a 200 page print quote per course at school, so go paper!

 

[Dangerer]

The kindle has like 3gb of usable storage space and it isn't expandable. Something to consider.

 

[scootermaster]

I don't like reading PDFs on a laptop. I was hoping one of the eReaders did a good job with them. I guess I should have been more clear, cuz I'm basically asking two different questions:

1). What's the best tablet/eReader for PDFs?

2). What do people do with all their references, vis-a-vis #1? BibDesk, for example, moves and sorts all your PDFs. So you could then just use that directory, import it in to iTunes, and sync that (hoping that iTunes won't move the files around -- you can disable this for music, and hopefully for PDFs/iBooks too). So while you wouldn't have direct syncing, it's the next best thing, because you'd just re-sync the one directory.

So I sorta combined the two questions in a "what do people use for a PDF-handling workflow". Obviously the main Bibliograph stuff is done on a laptop, and if people want to talk about the advantages for those programs (Papers, Bibdesk, Zotaro, etc) that's cool too (keep in mind, I have to use bibtex). But for actual reading of PDFs, I was hoping to get a tablet type thing.

Make any more sense?

 

[Dangerer]

were you unaware of the massive fire sale HP ran on their touchpads? Maybe you could consider picking one up on craigslist or ebay. Shouldn't cost much more than a nook

 

[Belegost]

Yea, I grabbed a few of the Touchpads, and it's a great PDF reader for the price. I particularly like that I can just plug in the USB to my laptop or desktop and drop files on it like any external drive.

 

[Anonemous]

Nice didn't know about Bibdesk. I use Mendeley for the PC.

 

[scootermaster]

Nice didn't know about Bibdesk. I use Mendeley for the PC.

I'm the exact opposite; I didn't know about Mendeley, and use Bibdesk. I'm intrigued by the cloud abilities of Medeley (although right now I just have my bibDesk files in a Dropbox folder, so I guess it's pretty much the same thing.)

How do you like Mendeley? I'm gonna try it out, and if it does a good job of scraping bibiolographic/meta-data, then maybe I'll switch. I'm not a bibdesk maestro, but I did find it hard to import .bib files (for example, many sites I know allow you to download .bib files associated with a specific paper. I found it hard to combine these with my main bib file; you'd think you could just, like, drag it somewhere and it'd import, but it proved more difficult than that)

I'd love to hear your impressions of Mendeley, and Bibdesk, when you get a chance to try it out.



And yeah, I was aware of the TouchPad stuff, but after the first rush I realized it wasn't a fight I wanted to get in to.

 

[xSauronx]

after hearing people say repligo was great for pdfs, then paying for it, then not really caring for it....i found that aldiko is pretty good, and free, on android devices.

not amazing, and i use a nook color so the page size isnt always optimal, which, unfortunately, is the case with pdfs.

maybe converting them would work? *Shrug*

 

[Darknite39]

HP touchpad + android (next week or so)? That is my plan, anyway. The TP is great for PDFs, and I no longer print my lecture notes for class. Even w/o modding, I am basically paperless.

 

[Mopetar]

I've used the iPad to look at research papers and honestly I wouldn't want anything with a smaller screen when viewing PDFs. With the iPad or anything else that size, you can get a full page on screen. Having a higher resolution, and a slightly larger screen would help a lot though.

Also, the iPad is a little slow when changing pages with some PDFs. The iPad 2 might be a lot better as it has a faster chip, but I don't know how much it would improve things.

If the iPad 3 were to have screen with a higher DPI and a faster processor that greatly reduced or eliminated the page turn lag, I would probably recommend that.