Tips for reading eBooks & PDFs?

There does seem to exist at least one tool that lets you make side notes in a PDF, but I don’t know any specifics about it. (A teacher of mine told me about it.)

I can’t do it on a computer screen. It’s just too much unlike a book. I have no problem reading my Kindle, though. Suddenly War & Peace is a third of an inch thick and it doesn’t hurt my hands to hold it!

I am the same. I read bits of books online and maybe a short story but otherwise I much prefer print. I can’t get comfortable with an online text but I have never tried using a Kindle or some such.

I agree that using a separate e-reader is best—I really enjoy the Kindle. I think they went through a lot of trouble to make it feel like reading a book (the “next” button is where you’l flip the pages, once you have a cover, you can fold it back for a similar “bookish” feel, the e-ink does not strain your eyes as much as a backlit thing would).

The e-ink eyestrain issue is actually pretty huge with me—I get migraines and become very light sensitive. Sometimes, when a migraine is in its early stages, if I get distracted enough I can ignore it. The computer is out for that since light = bad, but the e-reader or a book works just fine.

As for notes, there are several note taking systems in the various e-readers, but getting a cover with a notepad attached (like the Moleskin Kindle cover), would do the trick just as well (better, in my opinion). If you want to keep the location, the e-readers don’t have “pages” as such, but they do have a method of noting location in the text and you can easily jot that down as well.

If you are stuck with the computer, then play around with sizing and font/background colors if you can to see what works best for you. You might find that making it into a completely different experience works best because you no longer try to compare the two.

If you’re on a Mac, there are a few things that might help. Preview.app is a very powerful app that is deceptively simple looking. You can edit, annotate, reorganize, merge and otherwise manipulate pdf’s in pretty much any way you could ever want (and it’s a free built-in app).

Another point worth considering if you’re on a Mac is that you can invert the colors (so whites become black and blacks become white). This has the effect of reducing eye-strain for some people when reading lots of text, although it makes everything look weird—like a negative from a photo. You enable that mode via System Preferences—> Universal Access. Under the Seeing tab, there’s a section called Display, and within that is the option to check “white on black”. Text on a black background is supposed to be easier on your eyes, because you’re not being blasted with so much light.

I read a lot of lengthy technical .pdf’s, and so I picked up an iPad. There’s a 3rd party app called iAnnotate PDF that does a pretty good job with letting you highlight, make color-coded notes and bookmarks, pull up a table of contents to jump to specific chapters, or a list of all bookmarks in a document. It’s not perfect, but it’s pretty solid.