Summary
I have what seem like straightforward needs. I want to be able to read PDFs that I have saved in my Calibre Library and take notes in them. It turns out that this is not so simple at all. GoodReader and Kindle do not support my local OPDS catalog. ShuBook 2M and the quite expensive (but I’m not bitter) MapleRead SE have sub-optimal note taking abilities. Right now, KyBook 2 works well for me, but my search for the “best” method continues.
Introduction
While the fiction I read largely comes from Amazon via the Kindle and other online publishers as EPUB books, the professional literature and much of the non-fiction I read comes in PDF format. I won’t get into the discussion about loving or hating PDFs. My concern here is that I need to be able to read them and take notes about them in some useful manner.
Currently, I save the PDFs (and EPUBs) temporarily to my Dropbox account and then import them into Calibre on my desktop computer so I can assign metadata and be able to actually find the files again. Calibre makes the metadata and the files available via an OPDS catalog on my local network. It seems like it should be a simple matter to import those files into my e-reader of choice. However, it turns out that to then pull those files onto my iPad mini to read them is, well, not so simple at all.
The apps
GoodReader
Cost: $4.99
I really like this app. It works great with Dropbox, so I can pull in anything that I haven’t already moved out of Dropbox. It connects with many of the cloud services. I can also connect to my computer over my local network. This is a neat feature that I, alas, do not use very often. However, it doesn’t work with the OPDS catalog and that is the deal-breaker for me.
Despite that, I want to emphasize that the note-taking abilities in GoodReader are excellent. There is a plethora of tools; in addition to usual highlighting and commenting, there is underlining, strike-through, shapes, etc. GoodReader also has the unique (among the apps I am comparing here) design of saving notes as part of the document being annotated rather than in a separate notes file. The first time you highlight something, it asks if you want to “save changes to this file or do you want to create a separate copy of a file, and save changes there.” So you can have two versions of your document, one clean and one all marked up with your notes. It seems like GoodReader would be great for editing as well as note taking. I really wish I could use this app, but the lack of OPDS support makes it nearly impossible to create any sort of feasible workflow. Add-on note: This app does not seem to display a table of contents for PDFs.
Kindle
Cost: Free
Alas, this app does not work with my local OPDS catalog. I would have to add another step (or several?) to send all of the files to my kindle account, resulting in duplicated files that lack the metadata I assigned in Calibre. Nope!
ShuBook SE
Cost: no longer available?
This is an older app that I bought several years ago. It works fine with my OPDS catalog. I have mostly used it for reading EPUB books. It doesn’t work so well for PDFs. It doesn’t save my progress, so PDFs always say 0% done and I have to start from the beginning of the file each time I open it. This app has been superseded by ShuBook 2M (and ShuBook 2P). The website provides a useful comparison chart.
ShuBook 2M
Cost: $2.99
This app is better than the older ShuBook SE. It saves my progress through the PDF. There are no in-app note taking abilities, but I can highlight text and copy/paste it to an outside app (like OneNote, etc.). While that works fine, I find that the process is intrusive enough to interrupt my reading flow. So it’s not my favorite way to take notes. There is also no table of contents for PDFs in this app. I like this app but it works best with lighter reading where I don’t need to take notes.
MapleRead SE
Cost: $5.99
This app was a huge disappointment. It touts its note taking abilities (and charges heavily for them too), however, that apparently only applies to EPUBs and not not to PDFs at all. This app provides the worst experience of the apps I have looked at thus far for reading PDFs. Downloading them from my OPDS catalog worked great but PDFs are images only in this app. The website says “Note-taking including marking (highlighting) as images and commenting with 3 priority levels”(emphasis mine). That means no ability to highlight text at all. No dictionary look up, no text saved to notes, and no copy/paste to an outside app. I can draw a box on the page to mark it but that is it. Looking at my saved notes, I cannot see anything except that I marked something on page X. If I add comments to the marked box, I can see those, but that is not useful if I can’t also see the text that I commented on. Finally, while it has a VERY nice table of contents, there is no apparent way to export notes.
KyBook 2
Cost: Free/$3.99 in app upgrade
So far, this one has worked the best for me. Downloading from my OPDS catalog is easy. And this is the first app I’ve used that actually remembers my OPDS catalog from one use to the next. All of the other apps have to scan the network each time to rediscover it. Reading progress in PDFs is saved. Note taking is super easy and I can export the notes to an outside app once I am done reading the book. This app also has an interactive table of contents. Currently, this is officially my go-to reading app for PDFs.
Conclusion
This is an ongoing project (as they all are). Thus far, I think I have spent more time hunting for the right methodology than I have actually spent reading. Stupid internet! *Shakes fist angrily* I am collecting [all those cataloging and BIBFRAME] articles and [other non-fiction, like Anatomy! and Economics!] books faster than I can actually read them. Another method that I need to explore is converting PDFs to EPUB. This is easily done in Calibre. I have tried it in the past and was not impressed with the results. However, I will try it again because I am also just not satisfied with the usability of the PDFs. Another interesting idea to try is converting the HTML articles I find into EPUB rather than PDF.
One final thing to note here is that each of the reading apps above has a different interface. Learning how to use one app will definitely not help you to figure out the next one, it might even make it harder to figure out. Comments in the support forums for every single one complain that they are not intuitive. I suspect that “intuitive” in this case is shorthand for “that is not how my brain would organize things.” In any case, I have found that spending the time to click all the buttons (what happens when I tap that icon?) is the best way to figure how the app is organized.