Note-taking, research, and e-reader integration
 

questions:
(1) How can an e-reader best be integrated into an intensive note-taking system for long-term research?
(2) Specifically, if I wanted to read without sitting at my computer, what do you think the best way to take notes would be?

Hey! So I'm a grad student in social science, trying to put together a research method that'll let me use an e-reader. The idea is to avoid the expense of print texts and the insanity that comes from staring at a computer screen for twelve hours a day reading books and articles. As a content consumption device, they're perfect.

But any academic will tell you that there's very little point to just reading something; academic practice is all about research with the goal of finding points of commonality, congruence, and contradiction, both within and between sources. In other words, note-taking (a kind of production) is a non-optional part of consumption.

Computers offer the best note-taking possibilities. Digital notes can be sorted, tagged, linked to content, and searched. I have yet to find anything that works half as well (for me personally) as Evernote, which does everything I could possibly want it to, except that it's not available for any e-readers except maybe some from Sony (?).

So in general, e-reader are the best format for consuming digital text, but are not AT ALL smoothly integrated with digital note-taking systems, although some of them allow PDF markup. The point is that you need the notes to have their own interface, they have to be accessible without opening up the PDF file (or whatever file) and scrolling through it. Lots of (computer/tablet) reader apps have that functionality - Mendeley, Kindle - but they're still document-specific notes, which makes any real research-relevant organization impossible. So in Kindle, you get great cross-platform syncing of the highlights, underlines, and comments that you make, but to see them, you have to go back to the specific file. And there go all of the benefits of a digital text, because there's no cross-source organization.

Any additional information or thoughts on integrating note-taking and e-readers, from anyone, would be very very much appreciated. For instance, I've just bought an Onyx Boox m92 reader, which has great PDF display capabilities and some markup capacity, although I'll have to explore exactly what it can do (my computer is a mid-2009 MacBook Pro running OS 10.8.5).

I'm worried that ereaders just don't have enough functionality yet, and the only solution is to use some messy set of handwritten notes, PDF markup, and then typed (seachable, taggable) summaries afterwords. As I say, all thoughts and advice would be very very welcome, especially about e-readers and apps that I don't know much about.

Thanks so much for your time and help!

(also -- I'm so sorry if this is a repetitive thread! I've been trying to find answers on this question for ages, especially as I was choosing what device to buy, but I haven't found much that was of use).

There was talk of making a port of Evernote for the Boox. I do not think it every happened. However, their newer readers run Android or Linux. There is a version of Evernote for Android, and there is Nevernote for Linux.

My method requires some file manipulation, but it works fairly well for several projects I've worked on.
I use a Livescribe digital pen for all my handwritten notes.
I have a Kindle eink reader, and write notes at the document level on the device.
Everything ends up in MS Word.
Livescribe has an OCR app that converts the notes into text.
I pull in the clippings.txt file from the Kindle that contains all the notes and annotations from the books.
With everything in Word, it is then easy to search and organize the material. I'll even use the Send to Kindle app to send the Word doc back to the Kindle to have the document available when away from the computer.
Bob

Hey brilliant! thank you. Putting nevernote on sounds excellent. It's undoubtedly easy enough to transfer nevernotes into evernotes. My apologies if this is a stupid question, but do you know where I can go for instructions on installing an app on an e-reader? The Boox M92 runs on a custom Linux build, but that's all I know, and I have no idea how to go about adding software to it.

and @mncowboy, i appreciate the help. If I can't get a note-taking system to work with the hardware available, I'll definitely look into the Livescribe option.

Is there a web browser on that reader? I loaded https://draftin.com this morning and thought it worked pretty well on my Kindle Paperwhite. You can even save it TO the device if it handles MOBI.

From my own experience with note-taking, highlighting and annotations on an e-ink device, it is very slow, especially for copious amounts. Maybe things have improved but I'd be skeptical. I used to use my Sony 950 and just as there is a slight pause between changing pages, there was always a slight pause between each step in taking any kind of note. But that wasn't really the bad part as I could deal with that. The bad part is that the more notes/highlights/annotations stored on the e-reader, the slower it became, until it became ridiculously slow to the point of being almost unusable and trying to take a note was like pulling teeth with how slow everything was.

Together with easy access to fast info searches as needed on things I'm reading about (wikipedia, google, etc.), this is the main reason I basically exclusively use a tablet now for e-reading. I would much prefer to read on e-ink but the advantages of the tablet outweigh e-ink.

You might look at the entourage edge though they are not made any more. Reader/tablet combo. Comes inf 10 and 7 inch sizes. Ebay still has them and the market on there has them now and then.

Would this help? If you use a Kindle and I think a Kindle app, you can then find all of your notes synced online at https://kindle.amazon.com under the "Your Highlights" tab. You do have to make sure the Kindle is set to sync notes.

You can also import notes from Marvin & Goodreader iOS apps, and the Kindle, into a calibre custom column using the Annotations plugin.

I have no experience with apps on an e-reader, or with Onyx Boox for that matter. If you do not have a command line on the M92, and thus a traditional install is not an option, I would advise you to look and ask in the Onyx subforum on this site.

If you like Evernote why not just switch to an Android tablet, like a Nexus 7 and do your reading on that?
I have the Aldiko reader running on my N7 and I've only recently started using Evernote but both seem to work fine and the combination would seem to do what you're looking for.