I tried Goodreads but found its handling of document saving and location to be awkward. Also some annotations issues that technical support blew off led me away from it. Now I use PDFExpert and I’ve found it pretty terrific. BUT the thing that was missing was a OCR engine, since lots of articles I get from InterLibrary Loan (I am an academic and read tons for pdfs) are unconverted. PDFE has one now, but only if you subscribe to a strikingly overpriced subscription model. But I not only read Pdfs but grade a lot of them on all my devices and PDFE is the best, IMHO. For reading (and I’ve read literally hundreds of books—not for scholarship but entertainment— this way) I am a huge Kindle fan. The display is much better for the eyes than conventional screens, I’ve found, and I can read 10 hours on a long haul flight without strain. IF however, there are images, then it is useless, and I read it on the iPad. Also, the New Yorker—iPad only. We are so incredibly fortunate now: I used to fill up half or more of my luggage allowance (back when there were luggage allowances!) for research trips with books, dictionaries, NewYorkers (to read for those solitary dinners) and the like. Now, dictionaries, my whole library of Pdfs, JPGs of manuscripts, everything is on my MBP and iPad disk, plus the Cloud. BIG improvement. But I digress. iPad if there are images, Kindle if you are just reading, PDFExpert if you need to annotate.
I use DevonTHINK 3 to convert any PDFs to PDF+Text. A simple right click on any document in a DT database gives that option. I’d recommend it as a fellow academic, a terrific tool to gather research and notes and any affiliated documents and organise it.
DT3 is awesome for many things including its ability to convert PDFs to PDF + Text, unfortunately it’s not the best reader out there.
Hi Tommy and thanks.
I too use DT3 though I have to say
that FineReader (which is included in DT and which I also have in copy)
is not great at the conversion. Lines are not clearly defined, so when you select text to highlight, for instance, you get only half of it. Acrobat Pro was so much better, but I’m not going to pay their ransomeware prices.
I didn’t know about the shortcut, so that is
super helpful. WE get to work from home. Lucky us!
Kevin
Tommy
I use Kindle Oasis for my regular reading. It is great for now dimming eyes - I can adjust the type to whatever size I need and can read for hours. I agree that for pictures it is a no go with the Kindle. The other advantage is that I subscribe to BookBub and get some great books for either Kindle or Apple Books app at a greatly discounted price (often with options for discounted Audible books to go with the order.
I have a ton of books in the Books app and they are an easy read but the problem is the screens are not an easy read.
Find all the comments very interesting. Documents app in iOS used to be great but they have kind of messed it up for simple reading. Going to give PDF Expert a try - haven’t done that before though I have had it a long time. Did not find GoodReader what I was looking for but may go back and give it a second glance. Thanks for the suggestions!
Just want to add one more app that no one has mentioned: MarginNotes3.It is so amazingly useful not for casual reading but for intense reading with annotations and mind mapping, which is built in. Somewhat steep learning curve, but plenty of support and generally quite intuitive controls. I use it on both my iPad pro 11” and my iMac, and they sync just fine via iCloud. It also has built in OCR for a very low cost ($1.50/month or something).
This is interesting - I sometimes download old reference books from archive.org. This thread made me do a couple of different formats to compare. I did an ePub and PDF. The ePub is horrible in iBooks! But the PDF is the exact book as scanned.
If I open the PDF in iBooks and double click to read, it opens it again in Preview. I don’t remember that happening before, but maybe I don’t have many PDFs in there.
Diane
Diane D wrote: “The ePub is horrible in iBooks! But the PDF is the exact book as scanned.”
Sadly, archive.org epubs are almost always terrible. They’re automated conversions from the scanned pdfs. Since the scans are volunteer efforts with a wide variety of hardware and software, those aren’t always great either, especially the earlier ones. The epubs for straight prose (no illustrations, columns, tables etc in the book) are sometimes tolerable if you let your brain get used to the problems. Most of the errors are consistent enough for brains to cope. If you have OCR software, it’s possible to do a better job for that part, then to use a converter such as calibre to get a better epub, but it’s a lot of work and rarely worth it. Plus it will still probably fail for things with multiple columns and/or illustrations.
I’ve always used Goodreader as both a file system and pdf reader, though the interface seems to get worse with every version these days. But though it’s a little awkward, it does have the essential features - bookmarks, highlights and notes that I can email to myself so I have easy access to them. Most of the pdf readers annotate, but then you always have to open the annotated pdf to see them.
For epubs I use Mapleread CE and SE. SE can read pdfs, but I don’t like it for that, especially for the archive.org books for which it will let you select text but not highlight it. It’s also really slow at displaying a page - each page shows up one quadrant at a time (latest ipad mini). It’s kind of awkward in other ways too, but I haven’t explored the pdf settings thoroughly.
I also have kybook 3, but hadn’t tried it with pdfs. I just put in an archive.org pdf, and superficially it’s much better than mapleread. I can easily highlight and it’s much faster. If it can do the email notes thing well enough, I may be able to switch to it.
PDF Expert has a new feature that reflows the text and lets you change font size. Unfortunately, it looks like it’s iPhone only, so it’s useless for me, though perhaps great for others. I suspect that it too will have trouble with scans.
I just want to ditto MapleRead SE from Maplepop.com. I’ve been using it for several years now. Thank goodness I could finally dump iBooks!
I really like Readdle a lot. Before I used PDFpen but this acquired synchronisation issues (wouldn’t work properly offline any more). Maybe that got repaired, but now I’m only using Readdle. I really need a reader that allows you to scribble in the text and that seems to limit the options.