[bobnoxious]

As an academic I have been hoping for a larger-sized kindle for a long time. I have stacks and stacks of papers to read every week and adding annotations is important. However, probably more important is the ability to do this without having to sit at my desk. The iLiad provides this opportunity as long as papers can be easily moved on and off the device, with attached annotations.

However, another important aspect is the ability to efficiently find information among your literature. While the iLiad may provide a search function it still may not be up to the task. I can search for a keyword, but what happens if that keyword is in dozens of papers on the 25th page of a 100 page document. The refresh is terrible and you would spend ages trying to quickly find something.

As much as I love eink technology I think a giant iPhone like device or Fujitsu Stylistic running OS X is the right tool for academics. On my mac I can sort through hundreds of papers really quickly until I find that one I was looking for. It is certainly faster then the going through filing cabinets, or the inevitable stacks of papers on my desk with attached post-it notes.

If I am to buy an iLiad it will be just for the ability to read PDF files comfortably on my couch and not for archiving. But for the time being it is a little pricey just to serve that function, and am waiting to see how annotations are implemented.

- A note for the PhD students using a mac. I would recommend skim software for highlighting and annotating all of your PDFs. And I would recommend something like Papers or Yep to archive.