eBooks, Studies and Research- Do you have a "system"?

[1611mac]

Background:
I'm a preacher and over 90% of my eBook/eDevice use is for research and study. My books are also mostly public domain works, a lot of (scanned) books from the 1700's, 1800's from sources like books.google.com

My needs are to be able to read, study, and mark a book (annotations,highlights, etc) having it available (synced) on both desktop computers and eDevice. The marks (notes, annotations, bookmarks, highlights, etc) need travel with the book when synced.

I'm using an iMac, MacBook Pro, iPad, and iPod Touch using mostly Calibre and Stanza, but I don't want to limit the discussion to those items

For Discussion:
If you do study/research and markup of books, what "tools" (hardware and software) are you using, and how are you syncing everything from desktop to reader? (Including your notes and markup.)

"Thanks" goes to all contributors of this thread!

[Giggleton]

I would suggest the Kindle. Most of what you need is automated.

Text input on the Kindle is not the greatest, and I think there are issues when syncing sideloaded books but I don't use my laptop for reading the longform anymore. Nor printed books for that matter. There's no need for me to sync, and in the future I doubt many people will have a need to sync, a flexible foldable ereading device will be fine for all uses.

[1611mac]

Thanks Giggleton.. Yes, I use Kindle for Mac and the Kindle app on my iPad too but I'm mainly interested in what others are doing.....

[ATDrake]

K2 for "regular" reading w/notes exportable to K4Mac, B&N's NookStudy or B&N eReader for academic stuff.

The latter because it's easier to search/flip through to find a particular passage, and they've got different styles of markup/highlight colours to use, which can be annotated with tags and such and viewed in a handy index.

Also I can copy/paste passages with citation information, and in the B&N eReader version, export all notes and highlights at once and have them shareable if I send along the .kz or whatever it is file that's generated when a book gets marked up (NookStudy only exports notes; highlights must be copy-pasted, and everything is only backed up to your personal account, no sharing.)

As for K4Mac and the Kindle device, as of firmware 2.5 they no longer use quite the same type of .mbp file, so while you can drag your .mbp files for a non-Amazon book from a Kindle device to a K4Mac and have it work with the book and show all your notes and highlights, it doesn't work the other way around unless they've changed things as of K4Mac 1.4.

But you're using an iPad, so the point may be moot.