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?"

Comments

Oh man

[Anonymous Coward]

"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?

Uh, yes

[orledrat]

They exist. Don't pick one that is too weak to display large PDFs or too small to comfortably navigate A4. I'd probably pick this 9.7" Icarus Excel if I had to choose one right now: http://www.amazon.com/ICARUS-R...

Re:DRM

[Radak]

Last I checked, the Kindle is capable of reading and displaying quite a few non-DRM formats. You're stuck with DRM if you purchase books from Amazon, yes, but nothing about the device itself locks you into DRM.

I think you need a different software solution

[astralagos]

I think what you're really looking for is a research paper management application, such as Mendeley, Zotero or Papers. I personally use Papers, but that's a very mac-specific solution. There is apparently a Mendeley-specific application called KinSync that should help with using it on the Kindle. In general, if you're reading a bunch of academic papers and you don't have a manager like this, I recommend getting one.

Re:Short Evaluation

[buchner.johannes]

I wrote a small script that takes research papers and splits them up if they have two columns. It tries to figure out when you have figures, and to strip away the header/footer etc. It produces epubs (which you can convert with Calibre)

      https://github.com/JohannesBuc...

The pages are first converted to images, the white spaces figured out, and the page sliced and diced. The linearized content is a sequence of page number, and rectangle definitions. You could make those into a pdf again, but I just stick to images and html (epub).