As I've commented elsewhere, I'm a doctoral student, and I'd like to use an eBook reader as a tool in my academic work. I spent a little bit of time thinking about what my "ideal" software for this purpose would look like. Here are my suggestions. I post them here in the hopes that others with similar interests and needs can help refine them further (or possibly suggest existing software that can be used for these purposes).

Purpose of tool: to allow review of literature, as well as entry and analysis of qualitative data, entry (and possibly analysis) of quantitative data, and possibly creation and/or editing of drafts of research reports

Literature review/analysis:

Read PDF, txt, rtf, html, and (perhaps with conversion) doc
Allow each document to store metadata sufficient for generating MLA and APA formatted references (i.e. author, title, year of publication, publisher, etc)
For paginated documents, maintain awareness of original pagination. The easiest way to do this is probably to ensure half-page views of PDF, e.g. A5 size screen, with automatic page panning. Also allow entry of a start page offset number.
While reading a document, the reader should be able to:

highlight text for quotes, with metadata tagging
make notes (e.g. in margins), also with metadata tags

Export mode allows selection of specific metadata tags, and within those tags, specific entries may be selected/unselected
Export mode produces output list of all comments and quotes with MLA or APA formatted references
Bonus: include a decent RTF (at least) text editor so drafts can be created or edited on the device


Entry/analysis of qualitative data:

Freehand note writing, including sketches - will require HWR either on device or on base computer
Ability to highlight notes and tag with metadata, including multiple tags per entry and overlapping highlight "chunks"
Tool/view to search, group and sort entries by metadata, including hierarchical groups, boolean search, context search, and "sounds like" search, with search logs
Tools to search for strings in text and count occurrences of strings, create concordances, etc.
Tools to create cross-links between categories of metadata, classify codes/metadata
Bonus: semantic network tool allowing entries to be linked to nodes and nodes to be developed into networks illustrating relationships
Bonus 2: apply coding tools to audio data as well as text
Bonus 3: export to a wiki-compatable format for sharing with the research community


Entry/analysis of quantitative data:

creation and implementation of entry forms
Data-collection mode using entry forms, simple database to hold results
export to standard statistical packages (export field headers/codes as well as data)
Bonus: port R to the device (http://www.r-project.org)


It seems to me that the iLiad has the hardware necessary to meet these needs, because it has a stylus entry mechanism, but other vendors may also have (or be developing) appropriate devices.

Comments?

I would be interested in all of the following as well neko.

In 2006 Michael Mace (former Chief Competitive Officer and VP of Product Planning at Palm, VP of Strategic Marketing at PalmSource, director of Mac Platform Marketing at Apple) wrote about a product called the Info Pad (http://mobileopportunity.blogspot.com/2006/05/desperately-seeking-info-pad.html#About%20Michael%20Mace). I have been dying for one ever since!

Business/Academia really needs A4 size devices, something that can truly step in as a replacement for a printer without manually reformatting (which most people simply wont bother doing, however easy it is). Perfect for reviewing credit submissions, essays, board minutes, and simple as pie and saves paper.

Once the hardware manufactures start targeting this market then i am sure your software would be fantastic neko...

The larger it is, the more fragile (and heavier)... at least until a new technology comes along. :D Maybe those Plastic Logic screens will allow A4 size displays in a couple of years.

Meanwhile, I'd settle for an A5 screen - it's still better than printing everything!

@minimalposter - Thanks so much for the link to the info pad article. I finally have a box to fit into: "Information lover." I agree with you-- I seriously covet one of these devices. My favorite quote in the article: "Irex appears to be positioning it [the iLiad] for use in vertical professional markets. That's a little disturbing – business verticals are the place where failed consumer tech products go to die."

There seem to be mixed opinions on whether the iLiad can handle the refresh rate needed to be a true info pad, but no disagreement that the price is too high. Maybe the rumored nextgen ETI device will help. (Even the ETI 1150 comes close hardware-wise, but with no open software development environment, it's not going to mature into an info pad.)

Hi Neko,

I have been studying for an MSc in e-Learning since September, a course which is done completely remotely, no face-to-face, and I have stored and read all of the course material on the iLiad. The only time I printed out an article was when I once left my iLiad at home by mistake.

A giant leap forward for me was the zoom/rotate/continous modes for pdf. This was timely for me in that it made ALL of my PDF documents comfortably readable. Many of them were two-page-on-view scans of articles.
The next great advance was the addition of freehand notation to the PDF viewer software. Note writing and sketching is fine for me on the iLiad. There is a very short delay involved in the process, but you quickly adjust to this and forget about it. The only thing which is holding this feature back at the moment is stylus calibration.

Handwritten annotation capability puts the iLiad way ahead of other competitors in my view, particularly in an academic context. Without it you are forced to take notes on paper or on another computing device, which defeats some of the purpose of using an ebook.

I am with Mace in his scepticism about handwriting recognition and its value for text input. (Though I am interested by his indexing idea.) The iLiad's handwriting recognition is no worse but also no better than any other I have used. I also find onscreen tap-entry keyboards unusable. Other than for the capture of freehand text and sketches I do not see the iLiad as an input device, and so I don't share your priorities for tagging and the like.

I use my iLiad in combination with my desktop computer. I mirror my iLiad files on my desktop, and do searches in documents there. (This mirroring process should be possible wirelessly soon - it was promised in the last update but didn't make it.) Searching will be possible on the iLiad in future, but again, there is the crucial problem of text input. I anticipate iRex releasing desktop software which will also handle the handwritten annotations made on the iLiad.

My own priorities for improvements are to have an ebook device which is even more paperlike. For me this means much higher contrast than the iLiad; extreme speed of use (page refreshes, boot time, switching quickly + easily between multiple documents - all should be instantaneous); the possibility of colour, and a larger screen.

In terms of input capability, I can happily imagine a nice A4 device which slots into a dock with a built-in keyboard.... :cool:
When we have that, along with the improved features above, computing power will probably have advanced enough so that the ebook will BE your desktop computer, as well as your mobile reading device.

Given similar needs, I settled on the Motion LS800. On the up side, the LS800 meets almost all your needs. On the down side, it is expensive.

In terms of input capability, I can happily imagine a nice A4 device which slots into a dock with a built-in keyboard.... :cool:

I think I remember reading that the iLiad has a bluetooth chip. The iLiad may already have the hardware to support a bluetooth keyboard. All is needed is the software.

If I recall correctly, It doesn't actually have a bluetooth adapter built in, one of the, um ... community developers, scotty1024, was trying to get a USB bluetooth dongle to work in it, not really the same thing, but if it worked (I don't think he quite got there) then it would effectively give more or less the same result. :shrug:

re: A4 size... jinke is coming out with A4 size e-readers this year.
- at least that's what their website says

Given similar needs, I settled on the Motion LS800. On the up side, the LS800 meets almost all your needs. On the down side, it is expensive.
How long does the battery last on one of those tablets, anyway? I know people complain about battery life on the iLiad, but most laptops make it look limitless by comparison.

Regarding keyboard input, it's not so much that I want to write everything by hand (I'm no J.K. Rowling!) I certainly type more quickly than I write in longhand, and the results are usually more legible as well. :D But there are a lot of situations in which typing can be distracting, e.g. in class, in a meeting, or while observing a classroom for qualitative research. It's also possible to write while standing or even walking, whereas typing is tricky to impossible. That's why some kind of HWR is a good thing from my perspective, even if it happens offline or is used mainly for indexing/search. That being said, when I used to use my Newton for everything, I did have a keyboard in a cool folder that had a prop to hold the Newt up so I could view it like a screen while typing. That gave me the best of both worlds.

The weight of the motion is the main drawback (after price.) The units almost need to be disposable which indicates fewer features for a portable version and more features and weight (along with non-disposability) for a base or home version.

I have long maintained that one of the main reasons that ebooks did not take the market by storm was that people are not comfortable reading a verticle screen as one would on a desptop or laptop computer. Only when the surface is flat (or held in the hand as with the Sony Reader for example) does the reading become normal and therefore more relaxed. For study and notes this requires a surface to place the unit while in use.

The Motion LS800 runs about 2.5 hours on the standard battery and 5-6 on the extended when maxing out use continually. I have explored a variety of handwriting systems (my favorites are ritePen and Tengo) and find the lack of a built in keyboard irrelevant. I use Bluebeam PDF Revu to markup pdf's. M Word for most other documents. I use indCards for most notetaking and research writing. I generally do not use it to just read for pleasure. It is a little heavy to hold in your hand when reading at the breakfast table, but at 2 pounds it is one of the lightest and easiest to use pc's available. It is the best tool available, however, for research.

It does look nice... too bad it's nearly US$2k... and only runs windows. :?

I am too a doctoral student and would love a tool like this although the data entry and analysis are probably too much. I think that some basic note-taking and being able to highlight parts of documents is essential but I wouldn't use a small device like this to write papers, wikis or webpages even if it had the capability. On the other hand I do need a searchable document database and if it had versioning capabilities that would be a nice bonus.

Regarding the screen size I do believe A5 would be sufficient, especially if the device would automatically detect and remove the margins of pdfs (maybe it's being done already, I don't know).

I like the sony ereader, but the price is too high for a device that has only two features (display documents and play music) and the iLiad is definitely way beyond what I'd like to pay.

The other alternatives (whether they call them internet tablets, UMPCs or PDAs) would probably get close to what I want with good software but it is unlikely that they can simultaneously meet the screen size, weight, runtime and cost requirements.

As far as the Motion LS800, $2k and 2 pounds is too much and I'd still need a device for ebook reading

I'd say the literature review function is the critical area for me at this point. (The other functions would help to justify the cost of such a device, though.) I have a stack of articles I've read, and I need to reference them while writing papers. I want to be able to mark references and then find them again quickly and easily, so that as I read I build up my usable bibliography. BiBTeX (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BibTeX) as an output format seems like it would be especially helpful. It would be nice if the PDF browser could pick up as much metadata as possible from the document, but since we're talking about PDF and not some nice XML-based document system, probably some kind of half-screen form that allows you to select text and pull it into a BiBTeX interface would work. (For image scanned PDFs, you'd need a manual input method, and for some kinds of notes, not just quotations, you'd also need manual input.)

But then something that allows you to sift through your bibliography entries and pop back to the location in the document where they occurred would also be extremely useful. The iLiad doesn't create PDF bookmarks because it doesn't process PDF files (too processor-intensive, I guess), but it does keep track of annotations in a parallel XML file, as I understand it, so maybe something like this could be used for the bibliography entries. It seems to me that this would be useful for nearly any doctoral student, and many other students as well (especially if textbooks start to become available in e-versions).

I wonder if it would make sense to have a TeX interpreter directly on the iLiad (or other reader)?

References are quite important but it would probably be easier to handle them before uploading the document to the device. Journal databases are already capable of exporting citation information and if the software used to upload your documents supports it, it could keep a database of all the documents on the device (including citation information and possibly other stuff like where was it downloaded from, to which project is it related to, other notes etc.)

It is also my experience that complete citation info is not always available in the pdf anyway (metadata or no) and personally I prefer to store that info when I download a paper (even if I won't need it) rather than trying to find it later.

Nevertheless the capability of properly handling citations is useful only if you are going to prepare documents on that platform and to be honest I never felt like doing that on the go. Personally I prefer my PC for that since it's easier to type in a normal keyboard and I have access to other useful software for creating graphs and images as well as for data analysis.

Point is, you want to be able to mark interesting passages while you're reading and collect the references later, as you need them. Whether you prepare the reference metadata off-device when you download the item (if that's how you get it) or on doesn't matter so much as the fact that at some point you're going to want to be able to select from among your various notes and generate a reference list. That's the part I'd like to have the system take care of for me. Yes, I'll probably actually write the research document on my laptop. But as I'm doing so, I want the device next to me so I can flip around through different reference sections I've marked, select the items for export, and then get them in some kind of usable list at the end. Does that make sense? (Maybe I'm the only one who thinks this way, after all....)

As a mathematician:

As I've said elsewhere, I personally don't feel I need a4 (I asked about the ease of recompiling arxiv tex files to work in a3 elsewhere, but nobody knew - I'm guessing splitting would be far safer - do most ebooks currently support this by default?); I wouldn't mind viewing half pages landscape - I personally prefer portability. Also don't really need colour.

Annotations would be nice.

I REALLY don't need an mp3 player.

Being able to make scribbles might be nice, but it's not a big deal for me.

High storage capacity would be nice.

However, as someone who plays the piano:

A4 would friggin ROCK. Being able to scribble would ROCK.

Rock, I tells ya.

I still REALLY don't need an mp3 player.

Ideally I'd get both if they were available : )

Does that make sense? (Maybe I'm the only one who thinks this way, after all....)Makes perfect sense, neko, to me at least. Of course I have the advantage of watching my wife work her way through her dissertation, and considering what sorts of functions she'd need to 'electronicate' the reading/note taking process she uses. :shrug:



High storage capacity would be nice.As long as there's some sort of memory card slot, your storage is effectively limited only by how many cards you want to mess with. :wink: Speaking for myself, I want enough on-board storage for my readings, but for anything heavier-duty (such as y'all are talking about) I'd think that a reasonably well executed memory card approach might actually be better -- I find it a lot easier/quicker to pull a card and put it in the PC to do serious work with its contents there, than yanking stuff back and forth to on-board memory. Of course, that would require that the contents/annotations/etc. generated by the 'InfoPad' be readable on the PC. :nice:

Hi nekokami!

I advise you to consider a Compaq/HP Tc1000 or TC1100 TabletPc.

You can find a review of the TC1100 here:
http://www.tabletpc2.com/Review-HPTC1100.htm

and of the TC1000 here: http://reviews.cnet.com/HP_Compaq_Tablet_PC_TC1000_TM5800_1_GHz_10_4_TFT/4505-3126_7-20627295.html

You should be able to fetch the TC1100 on ebay for around 800 US$ and the TC1000 for around 4-500 US$.

I used to own a TC1000, and found it reliable. The only real problem was the affidability of the stylus connection. And the fact that it uses windoze of course... :D

Does that make sense?
Sorry I probably misunderstood what you meant earlier. Of course it makes sense and what bugs me is that some of the current devices almost have the hardware capabilities we want them to (at least the stuff that we can't do without). The problem is that their software doesn't support it and it seems that noone cares to implement the necessary functionality. Of course their price doesn't help either.
I still REALLY don't need an mp3 player
For me that shows to whom these devices are targeted. Especially for eInk this is the first generation of devices and maybe they want to play it safe, aiming for the widest possible audience.
recompiling arxiv tex files
Well I don't know the format of the arxiv tex files but if you have the source you can either change the document size to a5paper in the document class declaration or if the template doesn't support it use something like this:
\usepackage[a5paper,hmargin=0.2cm,vmargin=0.2cm]{geometry}
Afterwards you might need to crop your pdf. I found some instructions in this post (http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=7289) but I've never tried to do that.

So, now that I have my very own iLiad, I'm finding that I still want this annotation/bibliography tool. I'm willing to pay for it, too, but I probably can't afford to fund the whole development effort. Is there anyone out there who wants to work on this, open-source, if enough of us chip in something for the development?

Yeah, I'm with Emkay. I'm doing a social sciences masters. I read half a dozen papers a day from JSTOR and the like (A4 Pdf). No time to manually reformat. Once resizing and zooming became available, the Iliad suddenly became totally usable.; replaced course readers and printouts. Writing notes in the margins of the PDFs is a nice bonus too; I don't care that they aren't autorecognized, since that just added the functionality of paper printouts to the Iliad anyway. I wish the device was a LITTLE bigger, but its nice to be able to throw it into a bag without it taking up space. I guess A5 size overall would still be workable, but not an A5 screen with more crap around it.

It still isn't nearly as comfortable to use the Iliad as a single paper printout or a book, mainly because of the godawful contrast ratio (my biggest disappointment when I first flipped it on), and the slow page-flips. It's NOT like using a book since you can't rapidly find a random page by flipping through it...If white was really white, and if every screen refresh was more or less instant, ie you could run the pen along the little bar at the bottom and it would shuffle pages in real time, this thing would be as good as a book. Color is, I think, almost completely irrelevant for a reader--just give me a really white background!

The semester just started here and I'm in a class where we'll be reading a lot of journal articles (quantitative research design in education, doctoral level). Does anyone have software to recommend that might be ported to the iLiad, for tracking notes made on documents? They're in PDF, but I could probably fix that (though my OCR sw might balk a bit at some of the non-Latin statistical symbols).

Jarnal (http://www.dklevine.com/general/software/tc1000/jarnal.htm) is in Java and supports annotating pdfs. I don't know what it'd take to run it in iLiad.

From the webpage:

Requirements: Java 2 1.4.2 or later. Jarnal runs both as an application and as an applet.

The iLiad already allows notes to be taken on PDF. What I'm looking for is something that can TRACK the notes on the PDF, e.g. a bibliography tool. See #17, above. :)

I know of only two apps with functionality close to what you need, but I doubt they can be ported to iLiad. One is Mac only (Papers (http://mekentosj.com/papers/)) and the other one is a Firefox extension (Zotero (www.zotero.org)). The latter doesn't support notes on the PDF but only on the reference. I haven't found any other app that supports PDF annotation and organizing your notes at the same time.

Papers looks interesting, but doesn't seem to quite do what I need. As a way to organize PDFs, it looks good, but as a way to organize my notes in PDFs, I'm not seeing what I need.

Zotero looks more interesting. I don't care if the notes are stored in the PDF itself, but it looks like Zotero isn't yet able to look within a PDF and take bibliographical information or selected text from there. I guess I'd have to convert my existing PDF files to some other format, which would be somewhat of a nuisance.

What I need is something that replaces the "index card" method of reading, where you create a database of quotes or references, including citation, while reading, then organize those and use them to write afterward. For example, I'll need to write at least one literature review in the next couple of months. As I read through multiple documents, I need to be able to note interesting areas in each and categorize them. Then I need to be able to pull up that list of notes.

It looks to me like Zotero can do some of this this, but the lack of PDF support may be a critical failure. I was also hoping to be able to do it on the iLiad, but the full version of Firefox doesn't run there. :(

I know that you've long since chosen, but owning a Fujitsu Stylistic in the 4900 series, I wish I'dve had that with Microsoft OneNote or Franklin software in school.

Doubly so with the print function in OneNote 2007. Go to the PDF page you want to cite, print the page to a page in your OneNote section. (First print the title and bibliography data, or just sketch it in freehand with the stylus.) For non-printable books, I'm pretty sure you can do a screencap, crop it with whatever tool you'd like, then C/P it into OneNote (I can't remember for sure, but I think that OneNote could do the crop of your screencap if you wanted.)

Anyway, that's what I would use today if I were still in school. Sadly, I didn't get my Tablet until I was seven-plus years out of postgrad.

Hm. I suppose I could use FBshot to do this on the iLiad. I'd rather be able to select the actual text, though.

Anyone made any progress on this front?

For me the ideal tool would integrate with CiteULike (http://www.citeulike.org/). You should be able to synchronise your pdf library with the server (although there would be some issues with annotations) and keep a synchronised bibtex library that you can browse and maybe edit on the iliad. The killer features would be pushing back to CiteULike those papers that you have actually read and when you read them as well as an OCR'd version of your annotations as a private note.

The more I think about it the less work this seems (apart from the OCR which isn't really needed, it's mostly just a bit of logging, synchronising files and scripting some HTML gets and puts - it could mostly be done on a PC and then just copied back and forth) and the more useful it could be...

But I don't even have an iliad yet, never mind a working knowledge of what is and isn't possible on it, so this is all a bit pie in the sky...

See this thread: http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=22261