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?
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...
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).
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.