Hello all,
I have recently purchased one of these beautiful Iliad Readers (I have the book edition) and I have fallen in love, despite my lack of experience with this kind of technology.
So far I can clearly tell that the Iliad is going to significantly change the way I read and write from now on. I am downloading a huge number of literary works, articles and literary journals for free as e-texts. It is wonderful for reading pleasure as well as for research.
Personally, I will always love books as sensuous objects, being a huge bibliophile. However, it is certainly a very convenient way to collect and read texts and will be invaluable in my research. I think it will reduce the amount of books I have to buy, although I will always buy paper editions of favourites for my personal physical library and many books that aren't yet available in digital format for my studies.
I have a couple of questions and I hope you won't mind if I ask them here. As I previously said, I am really awful with technology!
I have searched the forums and read a great deal of posts but a lot of it is going way over my head! If any of you have the time to reply with a kind of 'idiot's guide' to the following then I would be grateful.
1) I would love to be able to use a dictionary while reading on the Iliad. I always read with a dictionary and at the moment I am wondering around with the Reader and a physical dictionary, which just seems silly to me! Is there any kind of searchable dictionary that I could use on the Iliad?
I have read a few threads where people were talking about having the ability to click on words in DRM files but this was lost on me! As I mainly read self-made PDFs or free PDFs from various academic websites and the like, would this kind of dictionary work?
All I really want is a searchable dictionary file I can call up for the occasional troublesome definition. Any assistance on this would be great!
2) I am a little confused about the notes system - I realise that I can write all over PDFs and I tend to do a lot of underlining and add the occasional word in the margin but there is not much space to make a huge amount of notes. I tend to write while I read and make plenty of notes. Again, at the moment I am tending to carry a notebook and pencil around with the Iliad so that I can note down quotations or ideas that I have when reading. This seems a bit counterproductive really so I am looking for some help here.
I notice that you can call up the keyboard while reading a PDF although it doesn't seem to do anything - does that have anything to do with notes?
What I would really like to do is to call up a blank notes page while reading and be able to write bits and pieces to it occasionally. Is this possible? How do other people manage their note-taking?
I've had my Iliad for 3 days and so far I think it is wonderful. There are certain things that I think could be improved, in particular the manual, which I found to be confusing from the point of view of someone not really experienced in this technology.
There also seems to be some basic functionality lacking which would make the Iliad absolutely perfect, for instance having a searchable dictionary bundled and having the MyNotes software bundled too! I've just spent £400 and I didn't expect to have to pay out for extras!
As a final quick question, I would be grateful to anyone who could tell me their favourite 3rd party application - the one they have found most useful. I am not looking for a definitive recommendation, I just thought it might be interesting to hear how other people have been using their Iliads and give me some ideas too!
Apologies for the long post and many thanks in advance for any responses!
D.