Quote:
Originally Posted by carandol
I could see the iLiad 1000 catching on with academics if it had decent search facilities. Being able to carry round all your text books, academic journals, and students' essays for marking would be rather useful.
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Absolutely. But they really need to have solved the interface problem, and they need to have improved the functionality of document display and markup. I really hope they've implemented some of the features in the community iPDF versions, especially the ability to excerpt selections. If they included an automatic annotated bibliography function, they could really capture the academic market.
Ideally, it would work like this: Read a journal article, and as you read, mark sections for excerpts (text or selection of a scanned image), or insert notes (scribbles would be fine). Then, when you connect to your main computer (PC, Mac, Linux...) give the option to extract new annotations. Pull those out to a simple database. Each entry would be tagged with the document it came from, with an interface to convert document identities to bibliography/reference entries in the standard formats, e.g. APA, using metadata extracted from the document or provided by the user. Allow the user to tag entries while reading or afterward. Convert scribbled notes to text, if possible, otherwise include them as an image. One could then generate annotated bibliographies based on selected tags at will.
Doctoral students and researchers would line up in droves for such a system. (I'd be near the front of the line myself.)