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Ask Slashdot: E-ink Reader For Academic Papers?
Albanach writes "Recently, I purchased an e-ink Kindle. I like real paper books, but I'm reading lots of academic papers. The Kindle is a nice way to carry and read them, and I went through several documents, highlighting important passages. Now I learn that there is no supported way to actually get a highlighted personal document back off of the Kindle with the highlights intact. I don't need lectures about DRM, proprietary software or anything else along those lines — there are other things the Kindle can and will be used for. What I would like to know is whether there's another e-ink reader that does let you add your own documents, then highlight them and export the altered document. Or does someone know of a way to achieve this using the Kindle itself?"
"I don't need lectures about DRM, proprietary software or anything else along those lines"
Are you sure you posted this to the right geek news site?
Instead of mindlessly repeating Free Software adages that, while important in the right contexts, don't even apply to the present situation, you ought to learn how the Kindle works. The Kindle is jailbreakable and one can run any custom software they like on it. While there was a scandal some years back about Amazon deleting content from Kindles, you have nothing to fear if you simply keep your device in airplane mode all the time (if you don't plan on buying from Amazon, there's no real reason to use the device's wifi or 3G capabilities anyway).
you have nothing to fear if you simply keep your device in airplane mode all the time
Like saying you're less likely to get robbed if you never go outside the house.
This is an impressive rant but it you spent as much time researching the problem as you took to write the rant, you could solve your problems.
On the cloud: Dropbox, etc. have clients for all OSs. You can even use Owncloud to have complete control.
Updating: You could spend a few minutes to set up your options to update when and where you want (Google it... all of the OSs have these options).
PDFs: Again, spend a few minutes to find a PDF reader that has the options you want.
(I did enjoy your rant, though. Good to see someone get this worked up on a Saturday morning. Maybe you should try getting outside more.)
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?