Dick Pountain /Idealog 364/ 07 Nov 2024 12:58
Besides all that arty stuff I wrote about in last month’s column, I also review books. Not novels, self-help or pop science books but rather heavier subjects like political economy, evolutionary and social psychology. Some of these tomes get big (I mentioned a 1000-page job back in column 315) and note-taking for such a behemoth is hard work. That’s why I was delighted to discover the notation abilities in Kindle ebook editions, which I’ve also mentioned in previous columns. This ability to bookmark pages, search for keywords, add comments and cut-and-paste notes and quotes has become essential to my way of working.
Regrettably or otherwise, Amazon’s dream that Kindle editions could take over the book business hasn’t materialised, with sales stagnating or declining and, more importantly for me, few of the academic publishers I deal with still producing Kindle editions. However they do all produce PDF versions, used internally for proofreading and so on. Hence when soliciting a review copy I now always ask for a PDF too.
The facilities provided in a PDF are sometimes sparser than those in Kindle Reader, depending on the settings used by the publishers and designers when outputting them, and so the capabilities of PDF readers have become a vital issue to me. I started out as everyone does with Adobe Reader, but found it less and less satisfactory over the years and not just because of Adobe’s grabby pricing structure – it’s become way too slow to navigate and search my biggest books. Also in column 315, I described discovering a far better PDF viewer, the Chrome extension PDF.js which is a free GitHub project built with HTML5. I’d been using this happily for several years until recently a Google change to ChromeOS stopped it working, and my Chromebook is too old to support the OS update now required. Before biting the bullet and buying a new computer I decided to try out all the PDF readers in the Playstore.
What a horror-show that turned out to be. There are dozens, maybe hundreds, of them nearly all crap. It appears every wannabe Android developer from Lapland to New Zealand writes one as his apprentice piece, then bungs it online to reap 2-star reviews. All assume you’re using a phone rather than a Chromebook, all offer their own wretched file management, and few can see external USB drives at all, so I soon became Olympically fast at the ’install-swear-uninstall’ cycle. Scouring the forums yielded recommendations for phone users only, few understanding requirements as demanding as mine. Then one glorious day in October I found Readera, which does almost everything that Kindle does (and a few things more) at remarkable speed and with a very comfortable UI. Not only does Readera read every ebook format you’ve heard of, on Windows, Apple or Android, but it does it for free without ads. And not only does it see external USB drives but its own PDF manager with cover thumbnails is actually superior to Android’s. I used the free version for several weeks but they lured me into spending £14.49 (one-off) on the Premium upgrade which offers colour-coding for notes, which I’d started using under Kindle but then lost with the Chrome extension.
An unexpected side-effect is that I’ve started using PDFs for all sorts of purposes besides book reviewing. I’ve always known you can print documents to PDF rather than a physical printer via the system print dialogs in Windows, ChromeOS, Android (and I imagine iOS too) but I’d never found much use for this until recently. I started having problems saving web pages to Pocket for various reasons and so the penny dropped – just Save To PDF instead and store the file locally rather than in Pocket’s cloud, USB storage being so big and cheap.Some websites offer a download option, but for those that don’t, save-to-PDF often works and retains all formatting and colour pictures.
I must stress that I’m not a pirate who re-sells or wishes to profit from such copies – they’re just aides-memoire for my writing of both book reviews and this column. For many years I used browser bookmarks but weblinks can break or just vanish and the bookmark hierarchies in successive browsers became more and more unwieldy. My local Idealog folder has subfolders like AI, Bio_Neuro and Quantum full of PDFs from journals like Nature, which I can find quickly to swot up or quote from.
What I’d like is a good grep-like utility that searches for text within multiple PDFs. Adobe Reader does this but its file management has irritating limitations, so occasionally I fantasise about writing one in Python (and bunging it in the Playstore to reap 2-star reviews) but the feeling soon passes…
[Dick Pountain thinks PDFs are Pretty Damn Fine]
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