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spinedoc77

macrumors G4
Original poster
Jun 11, 2009
11,374
5,222
I spent my lunch hour yesterday transferring 3000 pages of Radiology text to my ipad as the first series of me getting my entire textbook collection into my ipad. Now the hard part was to find something to read it with. I purchased Goodreader and found it to be quite crappy, I'm not sure why so many of you liked it. It has not annotating features at all, and it loads the pages up super super slowly.

Enter iAnnotate. It renders pages quickly. It annotates, and not just annotates, but has highlight, strikethrough, you can draw shapes, underline, etc etc. It also has an awesome UI where you can make your own toolbars. It has a lock feature so you can only scroll up and down, so you can zoom exactly how you want, then lock it in. It has full screen mode. Overall it is almost perfect, the only thing missing is night time mode where the text and background reverse, I'm going to email the dev and ask for this.

So any of you with printed material you want to put in the ipad this seems like the way to go.
 

DoFoT9

macrumors P6
Jun 11, 2007
17,586
98
London, United Kingdom
wow man. thanks so much for this write up. a lot of people have recommended goodreader for me - i wont have MASSIVE documents etc but they wont exactly be tiny either.

do u know the price of the app?

any other downs to this app except for night time mode?
 

caubeck

macrumors 6502
Nov 2, 2007
417
4
I use GoodReader to store hundreds of documents because it can take all formats. Then I can choose which app to open them in. This way I have all my Word, PDF, txt, HTML and image sources in the same place, but am not limited to accessing them at that location.
 

bluedog3401

macrumors regular
Sep 4, 2008
178
0
Overall [iAnnotate] is almost perfect, the only thing missing is night time mode where the text and background reverse, I'm going to email the dev and ask for this.

So any of you with printed material you want to put in the ipad this seems like the way to go.

For 'nighttime'mode, you can do this system-wide by assigning a command to 'invert' the display. Many people use a triple-click of the home button to enable/disable this feature.

To turn on the ability to do this, go to your Settings app->General-Accessibility Then assign the 'Triple-click Home' to be the "Toggle White on Black". It would be cool for a developer to include this in their ereader app as a quick option.
 

spinedoc77

macrumors G4
Original poster
Jun 11, 2009
11,374
5,222
caubeck said:
I use GoodReader to store hundreds of documents because it can take all formats. Then I can choose which app to open them in. This way I have all my Word, PDF, txt, HTML and image sources in the same place, but am not limited to accessing them at that location.

How do you get another program to open a file saved in good reader?
 

gillybean

macrumors 6502a
Jul 21, 2008
788
2
Seattle, WA
I think it's much easier to get files into GoodReader, so I've been transferring PDFs to GoodReader (e.g. from Safari you can just set a link to be ghttp:// and it downloads to GoodReader) and then opening them in iAnnotate from there.
 

nickknight

macrumors newbie
May 26, 2010
12
0
I am downloading this when I get my iPad in the UK tommorow straight away! I do Philosophy of Religion and I have about 2000 pages of text books which I can get in electronic format! I'm going to convert them to pdf and annotate away :D
 

Jaro65

macrumors 68040
Mar 27, 2009
3,822
926
Seattle, WA
I just got it, having read some of the above comments. iAnnotate works very well. Well worth it if you need to edit the PDF's.
 

imacdaddy

macrumors 6502a
Feb 2, 2006
661
0
I spent my lunch hour yesterday transferring 3000 pages of Radiology text to my ipad as the first series of me getting my entire textbook collection into my ipad. Now the hard part was to find something to read it with. I purchased Goodreader and found it to be quite crappy, I'm not sure why so many of you liked it. It has not annotating features at all, and it loads the pages up super super slowly.

Enter iAnnotate. It renders pages quickly. It annotates, and not just annotates, but has highlight, strikethrough, you can draw shapes, underline, etc etc. It also has an awesome UI where you can make your own toolbars. It has a lock feature so you can only scroll up and down, so you can zoom exactly how you want, then lock it in. It has full screen mode. Overall it is almost perfect, the only thing missing is night time mode where the text and background reverse, I'm going to email the dev and ask for this.

So any of you with printed material you want to put in the ipad this seems like the way to go.

Thanks for the post. GoodReader will implement annotation which is very high in their priority list and should be released soon (according to an email I received from the devs). I'm waiting to see how well it is until buying iAnnotate.

I like GoodReader because I can access files from DropBox, MobileMe, Email, and even has a built-in FTP client which I can FTP to my work's fileserver. I love the latest update which allows you to open files in other apps. Once Documents To Go comes out for iPad, this will be the perfect combo. The iPad will be the road warrior machine for me.
 

macbwizard

macrumors 6502
May 23, 2005
282
54
Question: I just graduated from college (and headed to med school) and am wondering where you guys got your electronic textbooks. I never happened across a downloadable textbook (some were online in HTML) in my four years, but am excited to hear that there is a such thing! Are these common?

Also, iAnnotate is pretty awesome.
 

spinedoc77

macrumors G4
Original poster
Jun 11, 2009
11,374
5,222
macbwizard said:
Question: I just graduated from college (and headed to med school) and am wondering where you guys got your electronic textbooks. I never happened across a downloadable textbook (some were online in HTML) in my four years, but am excited to hear that there is a such thing! Are these common?

Also, iAnnotate is pretty awesome.

In relation to myself I scanned my textbooks into my iPad in PDF format, I've only scanned half a dozen textbooks so far, but it's pretty easy and quick.

The only place which currently has a lot of electronic textbooks is http://www.coursesmart.com , bit I decided against them for a couple of reasons. They are subscription based, so you don't get to keep the book. It's actually cheaper for me to buy the book used (it's still cheaper even if I buy the book new) and scan it in manually. Plus it looks MUCH better in iannotate or good reader than their app.

Let us know if you find anything else. I spent a couple of hours and really didn't find many out there for hardcore e-textbooks.
 

gillybean

macrumors 6502a
Jul 21, 2008
788
2
Seattle, WA
In relation to myself I scanned my textbooks into my iPad in PDF format, I've only scanned half a dozen textbooks so far, but it's pretty easy and quick.

The only place which currently has a lot of electronic textbooks is http://www.coursesmart.com , bit I decided against them for a couple of reasons. They are subscription based, so you don't get to keep the book. It's actually cheaper for me to buy the book used (it's still cheaper even if I buy the book new) and scan it in manually. Plus it looks MUCH better in iannotate or good reader than their app.

Let us know if you find anything else. I spent a couple of hours and really didn't find many out there for hardcore e-textbooks.

If you scan it manually, don't you run into the problem that you can't do text-search or highlighting unless the words are identified with OCR (which isn't always accurate)?
 

spinedoc77

macrumors G4
Original poster
Jun 11, 2009
11,374
5,222
If you scan it manually, don't you run into the problem that you can't do text-search or highlighting unless the words are identified with OCR (which isn't always accurate)?

My scanner came with adobe 9 which has OCR software. So far it's been pretty flawless.
 

ponyochan

macrumors newbie
Mar 6, 2009
14
0
Great find. I've got a ton of Forrester research papers in PDFs so this tool will be handy - must check out.
 

Jeff Flowerday

macrumors 6502
Aug 23, 2007
299
101
Calgary, AB
Doesn't help, tried that right after the first crash.

Ok solved my crash problem. It only happened when I opened with via good reader.

If I transferred the pdfs via iTunes and let them complete processing before opening them, all was fine.

But now I have a new problem. No table of contents/PDF outline. goodreader got the table of contents from these pdfs just fine.

This makes it near impossible to traverse the document without guessing page numbers.
 
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