[mormequill]

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).