How To Read Academic Papers On Kindle Or Other E-Readers?

For reading academic papers on e-readers, it’s a mix of tech tweaks and workflow tweaks. I get papers sourced in EPUB or MOBI where possible (arXiv papers are usually provided in these formats, for example). For the PDFs, I use K2PDFopt to try and get a good text reflow, particularly for 2 column journals. I read papers on my Kindle Paperwhite, with warm light enabled for extended reading sessions.

Most of my book organization is handled in Zotero but then I export collections to my Kindle via Calibre and use custom tags such as ‘To Review’ or ‘Cited’ in the metadata. The clipping function on my Kindle allows me to highlight sections of a given paper and they auto-sync to the notes section of my note taking app. For collaborative work I can share annotated versions of given e-books with colleagues via Kindle’s ‘Send to Kindle’ email address. The vocabulary builder (turned on for technical terms that I highlight) also creates flashcards from the highlighted jargon.

The biggest challenge is managing references and thereby balancing the advantages of reading on e-ink with the demands of academia that require precise handling of linked footnotes and the like. So far, I can manage that with my tablet, especially the newer models with more powerful processors.

Some papers don't want to be read on a Kindle. Most humanities papers read fine on a Kindle, but papers with a lot of graphics and charts for STEM subjects can be a real pain. I use a three step process to read PDFs on my Kindle: First I run the PDFs through Adobe Scan’s OCR to get the best possible text recognition. Then I upload them to Google Drive and use CloudConvert to convert them to EPUB. (Converting PDFs to Kindle format directly doesn’t seem to preserve footnotes very well.)

The Kindle does a lovely job of tracking your “My Clippings” which I export on a weekly basis to add to my academic note network in Obsidian. I’m relying on that file heavily these days. I’ve worked out a set of highlighting rules that serve me well: yellow for the main argument of a passage, blue for methodological notes, and pink for phrases that are quotable. Where a reference can be actively read, I look up the reference in the paper being read with my phone. E-reader browsers are generally terrible.

However, older Kindles with physical buttons such as the Touch and Paperwhite models work very well for STEM heavy papers as well as for Humanities papers and have much more predictable page turning when ‘skim reading’ as opposed to the page turning speed on more modern Kindles. Also, I have customised the dictionary on my Kindle to include the main dictionaries (as used by me) such as Oxford English Dictionary as well as various technical dictionaries.

However, if you manage to set it up properly, it’s a complete game-changer. I convert all PDFs to EPUB (using Calibre for this purpose since it’s easy to use and supports lots of input formats) since the Kindle handles reflowable text much better than it does fixed-width text. Highlights and notes from Kindle books sync up beautifully with Readwise, which then helps me to consolidate all of the insights from my reading into a single database of notes. For very dense papers, I increase the font size to Bookerly at size 5 (which is readable for me) and use the X-Ray feature to identify recurring terms. A growing number of journals now offer direct EPUB downloads of articles, which include figures and tables in a clean and readable format. I’ve also started to tag articles by topic, which makes it easy for me to return to related material later. All in all, it’s not perfect (complex equations are still a bit of a mess) but the portability and search functionality make up for this.