Astute readers may have noticed that I'm deeply interested in (a nicer way of saying obsessed by) note-taking. This is no coincidence, because all my main occupations - editing the Real World section, writing this column, writing and reviewing books - involve reading the work of others and gathering together important points. Anything that reduces the amount of re-typing required is a bit like the difference between weeding a field of beans using a tea-spoon and using a tractor. Just few years ago my desk groaned under thick hard-back books that bristled like porcupines with small yellow Post-It notes to mark those pages I needed quotes from, or had pencilled margin notes on.
Making notes on a tablet that could sync with my laptop removed the need for those yellow flags, but still left me the job of re-typing the quotes into my own text. (Over the years I'd tried several of those pen-like or roller-like handheld scanners, but none was effective enough to be worth the hassle). No, the logical final step is for the source material I'm reading to be online too, but it's taken until now to arrive there. For the very first time I'm reviewing a book in its Kindle rather than paper edition, which means I can search its full text for relevant phrases and cut-and-paste all the resulting notes and quotes. In theory that is, because it turns out not be quite so simple.
Amazon's Kindle reader software certainly enables you to place bookmarks, highlight passages and make notes, but none of these functions is without its quirks, and the way they work varies between versions. I like to use an actual hardware Kindle when outdoors because it's light, readable in sunlight and has great battery life. Indoors I prefer to read and note-take on my Android tablet, but I write the actual review on my Windows laptop, and all these platforms run different versions of the reader.
First quirk is that the granularity of Kindle bookmarks is too broad, working only to whole page boundaries. When I view Notes & Marks the short extract presented is only the top few lines of that *page*, though my interest might lie further down. Highlights are more useful because then the extract is from the start of the highlighted area, not the whole page. I can attach a note to any single word on a page, but in Notes & Marks only its text appears, so I end up with a cryptic list like "yes", "no", "good", "really?" with no idea what each refers to until I click it and go to that page, which becomes dizzying after a while. The best compromise is to highlight a sentence or paragraph and then attach a note to its first word.
Next quirk: notes, highlights and bookmarks should sync automatically between Kindle, tablet and desktop readers, but notes made on my tablet weren't showing up on the laptop. This matters because I can only cut and paste highlighted quotes from the laptop version, as Kindle and tablet versions have no copy function. Solving this required a stiff yomp through the forums, where sure enough I found an answer - you have to manually sync by hitting that little curly-arrows icon. Still didn't work. More forums and the real answer. You have to hit *not* the sync icon inside the book in question, but the one on the home screen with all books closed. Doh! But it does work.
The last quirk is that you can't run multiple instances of Kindle reader on the same device. It so happens I have another book on my Kindle that's relevant to this review and I'd like to quote from it: have to go out into the library, open other book, find quote, cut-and-paste (but on laptop version only). It would be nice to keep two books open in two instances of Kindle reader on same machine. I really shouldn't grouse too much though, because merely being able to search, make notes and cut-and-paste them has hugely reduced the amount of tedious re-typing involved in the reviewing process, and I also need to remember that Amazon is obliged by copyright and fair-usage to restrict some of these functions (a copyright notice gets placed on every quote I paste, which I delete).
Nevertheless I do believe that Amazon is missing a trick here, and that just making a few fairly minor tweaks would establish a really effective collaborative network for students and researchers to share notes and quotes, which wouldn't need to carry advertising since the product has already been paid for. That would of course grant Amazon the sort of dominance that the US courts have already refused to Google, but let's not go there...
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