Which Book Readers Allow Highlighting In Novels For Notes?

We’ve lost sight of the human element here. The best app is the one that you’ll return to again and again. My friend loves Xodo for PDFs because she can add arrows and circles. I’m a big fan of Moon+ for EPUBs because of the text export option. My spouse only uses the Kindle app because it’s so simple and easy to use. All of these people are correct. The features list doesn’t matter as much as the app becomes a habit for you and you start to naturally reach for it to jot down a thought or note while reading a particular book. Your gut will pick the best tool for you after you’ve downloaded a few and tested them out for a week on each of a few different books.

It looks mostly the same to me as it did in the early days of our books, presses to drag open menus with small text. If I am typing out a note that is longer than a few words, I have a tendency to lose my place. Because of this, serious academic annotation is still best done on a tablet with a real stylus. The Paperwhite is perfect for casual underlining and 'wow' moments of insight. Not for detailed, hand written marginalia.

I’ve read recently – with much pleasure – The Pisces by Melissa Broder. As I said earlier, Notes on Heartbreak is a deeply emotional read and whilst The Pisces is a vastly different book, it also deals with the depths of heartbreak and the journey of the person left to pick up the pieces after. The book is wild and crazy and at times surreal, but it’s also very real and is a very humorous take on the typical heartbreak stories that we read about. Annie Lord is another author who tackles tough subject matters with honesty and Unflinching courage in her writing. For an even more twisted take on relationships, you have to read Exciting Times by Naoise Dolan. The book is a smart and quirky dissection of the stresses of dating in your 30s and follows a protagonist as conflicted and as stuck in limbo as the narrator of Notes on Heartbreak. It’s fun and often laugh-out-loud and the dry humor has got me reading passages aloud to my flatmates to get their take. Even more, though, it’s good to have this sort of relatable take on a series of relationships, whole from the really bad to the just plain stumped. If you are looking for something a little more lyrical but equally painful, I highly recommend Graham Greene’s classic The End of the Affair. The story is of a man whose obsessive love of a woman that ended in an affair culminates in her unexpected death, and in the years that follow, he struggles with his jealousy, anger and conflicts with his Christian faith. As with Notes on Heartbreak, the novel is intense and leaves its reader shaken. It is a stunning exploration of love, and is written with incredible precision and beauty. Finally, I picked How to Love a Jamaican by Alexia Arthurs because it’s different but also explores themes of love. This is a collection of short stories that follow a variety of characters, all dealing with love and relationships in different ways, from identities of families and cultures to how people are dealing with being diasporic. I find that this book is similar to Notes on Heartbreak in that the emotional range of the stories goes from extreme love to extreme hate, and in between there is a lot of love and it is so beautiful and relatable that it will make you feel all the emotions and hopefully see a little bit of yourself in the characters. Like with Notes on Heartbreak, reading How to Love a Jamaican will leave you feeling wrecked but better in the end.

Oh the humanity if we couldn't read our books offline, we'd probably revolt. As it stands, offline reading of stories and information is a basic accessibility feature, and (big) companies know that not everyone has reliable, affordable internet connection all the time. They’d like you to read their e-books everywhere, not just when you have phone signal. Which is why they’ve set things up so that by default you get to download the book. The option to Remove Download is secondary, but they want to make it easy for you to experience the better way of reading a book – that which is stored locally on your device and ready to go at a moment’s notice.

My cat stepped on my Kindle once. The resulting annotation, “hhhhhhhhhh”, is to date my most profound annotation on the book.

I’m a tactile reader. I like apps to mimic the physical ergonomics of books. Google Play Books is surprisingly good at pinch-to-zoom, no blur at maximum zoom, and does cloud-synching of your libraries for you, which is great for me. Comic Screen is very good for reading manga and illustrated books. This application allows to isolate the panels and to zoom in very dynamically, it is frequently name-dropped by the producers of graphic novels in perk descriptions of their Kickstarter projects. Recently I also discovered ReadEra application, it has a split-screen mode to reference footnotes while keeping the main text enlarged. Bonus points for having no ads. The apps listed are not tools to read, they enhance your reading experience greatly. It’s cool that some indie comic artists list ‘Comic Screen’ in their Kickstarter perks for graphic novels.

From a technical point of view, yes, we support cross-device syncing of reading progress, bookmarks and annotations. ReadEra uses cloud backup integration (like Google Drive) for syncing, not a proprietary sync server. The first step is to configure a cloud backup location within the app’s settings (Google Drive or another service). Subsequent backups can then be set up to happen automatically or manually. To sync to another device, you’ll need to download and install ReadEra on that device, sign in with the same cloud account, and then restore from a backup. Note that what’s restored is what’s currently in the local database of the device you’re syncing from. This means that what’s restored will overwrite the local data on the device you’re syncing to. Hence, you want to make sure the device you’re moving from has been backed up recently to avoid losing work in progress. As for how often this overwrite happens, it’s not a continuous, bidirectional merge. Instead, it’s set up for planned, occasional exchanges of devices, not for frequent, ad-hoc switching between devices.

I didn’t know that kind of content was available on that site. Mostly I read fantasy and sci-fi, but this sounds like a more diverse selection than I had realized.

I recently purchased the latest BOOX e-reader model, and so far, it is great with PDFs. The biggest selling point for me was the option for a larger screen (I got the 10inch model), which is great for things like technical manuals and books that are fixed in layout but too large to read on a standard e-ink screen. The built-in tools for dealing with PDFs (margins, etc.) are brilliant, and really allow for reflowing of text on documents that aren’t optimized for e-readers, as well as increasing contrast to reduce ghosting. I’ve loaded up lots of academic papers and old scanned in books, and they all work a treat – far better than I’ve found with my Kindle. File size does mean that turning the pages can be slightly slower with image heavy PDFs, but otherwise it’s a solid yes for reading. Note though that some scanned in books are essentially just that – scanned in books – and will need a lot of cropping. The note taking facilities, and ability to use a stylus, are also great, for annotating academic papers and the like. Yes, it’s not perfect but for an e-ink reader it’s about as good as it gets without taking a tablet with you.

Never. I learned that the hard way when I first joined Naver Webtoon, since I was reading so much online manga with hazy lines and everything. So, I searched for some of the more mature genres, but the results were so bland. Even the “mature” ones are mostly psychological or with lots of violence, not sex. The consequences of a curated garden: yes, it is “easier” to read, to browse around without the fear of clicking on malware-ridden ads, to navigate, but we’re definitely missing out on many, many stories of human experience. Especially the more complex, adult ones, with all their writhings, relations, and woes. Instead, they’re sanitised, and oftend not even as good as their uncensored counterparts. This is why Webtoon exists: for the masses of readers who seek escapism, are looking for a trip of power, or want sweet romances with little complexity. But for the reader who seeks explicitly adult content, browsing through Webtoon is like roaming the young adult section of a library, looking for the restricted adult section.