Kindle is not for me

Surely I must count as some sort of a dinosaur, as it was only today that I’d purchased – and then promptly returned – my very first Kindle e-book. I managed to avoid Kindle up until now by being able to find paper books or online e-books at my university library for the titles I needed. But today I urgently needed a book that wasn’t available at my library and I couldn’t find it in any other electronic format.

I did see the book before in some kind of a PDF format for a reasonable price at Google Play, and I naively assumed that it would be waiting for me there in my moment of need. It turns out that e-books can sell out too (how exactly, I don’t quite understand), as the PDF was gone from Google Play and is nowhere to be found on the net.

The Kindle version of the book I was looking for was slightly cheaper than the paperback, and if I bought it I could have it instantly, so I took the plunge and purchased it. I downloaded a copy to my “Kindle for PC” app, and another copy to the Kindle app on my iPad. But as soon as I started reading, I began to run into several disappointing surprises.

First, there was no real pagination for this academic e-book, which meant that I wouldn’t be able to reference quotes directly. I was amazed that after all these years of kicking around, the Kindle people still haven’t solved this problem.

I also found it inconvenient that when I carried out any sort of operation with the e-book such as a simple search, Kindle would re-flow the text and it would end up looking different every time. The highlighted text with my note that I expected to find at the top of the page ended up at the bottom of the page and so on. Annoying. I need to have a sense of where stuff is in the book that I’ve already read and made a note of. Shifting its position around just makes it more difficult to comprehend an already challenging academic text.

Then I discovered that there was no direct and easy way to export my highlights and annotations from either the PC or the iOS app. The only way I could get any quotes or notes out was if I enabled an external clipboard capture software and copied each quote and note individually. I was ready to put up with that until after an hour of copying and pasting Kindle had kindly informed me that I had reached the copying limit set by the publisher. What? I’ve paid for this book, I should be able to copy out anything I like from it for my personal use, just like I can do with a paper book. I was starting to get angry.

The “icing on the cake” was when I had enough of reading on  the PC and I decided to carry on in my armchair using the iPad. When I loaded the Kindle iOS app, I fully expected to see my highlights and annotations that I had created on the PC app and which had been synced with the Amazon cloud. But after several attempts at reloading and refreshing, my notes simply didn’t show up on my iPad.

Perhaps some of the above problems had to do with me being a Kindle novice and missing some of the features that may have solved them instantly. But I just had an overwhelming feeling of being underserved and constrained by both Kindle apps and the entire platform. Both apps are very feature-poor compared to such excellent PDF readers like GoodReader or PDF Expert. I could think of two possible reasons for this. 1) Amazon can’t be bothered about the academic market that needs page numbers and annotation sync and export, or 2) it is some sort of an underhanded effort to force you to buy an actual Kindle device, where I presume at least some of the above issues have already been resolved.

Whatever the case, I’ve returned my first Kindle e-book and I will avoid buying another one, if I can help it. And I certainly won’t be buying a Kindle device any time soon. I’d rather read a good old PDF file on my iPad any day!

P.S. (12-Apr-2013):

Another shortcoming of the desktop PC Kindle app is its inadequate search function. I did a search for a single word in my e-book, and Kindle returned the suspiciously round figure of 100 results. I went through all the 100 results and then repeated the search. Not only did I get a different figure the second time (99 results), but they included results not contained in the previous search. When I manually flipped through the rest of the book, I found several occurrences of the search term that were simply not found by the Kindle app in either of the first two searches.

Together with everything else I mentioned, this makes the Kindle PC app – in conjunction with the iOS app – unsuitable for academic reading (at least in comparison with the tools available in PDF readers such the aforementioned iOS apps and PDF-XChange Viewer on the PC).

P.P.S. (12-Apr-2013):

Out of curiosity, today I had installed the PC app for NOOK Study and downloaded the same e-book (in whatever format NOOK uses) that I tested with the Kindle app. NOOK Study is directly targeting the academic audience, so I expected it to be more sophisticated. And it was, to some minor extent. For one, it allows you to export your annotations in .doc and .txt format, which would work for me. But I still found it far inferior to the PDF readers I use. I wasn’t able to test the search function because, as NOOK informed me, they were still building the search index for this book, and the search function would be available at some point in the future, depending on the size of my library. It all sounded a bit too tentative to me.

However, the problem of the page numbers has not been resolved. NOOK did provide the page numbers, but they were not the same as those of the paperback, which they claimed to have used for the e-book version. Basically they had started numbering the pages from the electronic table of contents that they had inserted in front of the cover of the scanned book, and then they kept on counting all the pages for which there weren’t even page numbers in the paperback. For this reason all the page numbers had shifted. This wouldn’t be a problem if the text of the book had not been reflowed, as I could have just recalculated the pages myself. But unfortunately NOOK re-flows the pages, meaning that the pages become meaningless and useless for the purposes of academic referencing. Too bad. PDFs it will be…

WizMouse and ConnectedText

Speaking of WizMouse, I have just come across this review of it by Mark Fuss, who does a good job of explaining what it does. In the course of the review Mark also mentions ConnectedText, as an example of a programme that is incompatible with WizMouse. Actually, on my Windows 7, 64-bit system WizMouse works perfectly well with CT, so I’m wondering why it didn’t work on his machine.

Update (08/03/2013):

Mark is right after all, WizMouse is not 100% compatible with CT. It works well with the docked CT panes for me, however when I tried it on an undocked Navigator window (where the default behaviour for the mouse wheel is set to zoom), it behaved erratically, first scrolling, then switching to zooming. Overall however there are still a lot of benefits for using them together, especially when using two or more monitors.

Latest entrants: The Guide, FocusWriter, and WizMouse

The most recent additions to my Favourites list are The Guide, FocusWriter, and WizMouse (all FREE).

The Guide is a lightweight, fast, and easy-to-use dual-pane notes organiser and outliner. I needed such a software for the specific job of storing text fragments that I edit out of my draft but I want to keep in an organised manner. I tried to use Scrivener for this but it was too big and slow for that. The Guide starts up quickly and it can be minimised to the system tray. It is also easy to add icons to the outline items (to check them off or to identify important ones for revisiting). Finally, it can also do rich text editing and export. It is very simple and that is exactly why I like it.

FocusWriter is a distraction-free writing environment. I’ve tried a few in this category and none of them worked for me for one reason or another. But FocusWriter really hit the spot. For one, it can truly hide everything, so it’s just the words and the default grey background (which suits me fine). Also, the toolbar (which hides) is highly customisable. Finally, it is very easy to modify the default theme and create new ones. And if you want something fancier, you can download one of these beautiful themes (though they may become a distraction – which is why I’m sticking with the default grey). As for the typewriter sound though, I will stick with ClicKey because there seems to be a lag with FocusWriter’s own sound.

WizMouse is a utility. It allows you to scroll windows under the mouse with the mouse wheel without having to click on them first. That’s it. But first you will need to unlearn the habit of wanting to click on the other window before scrolling. It’s amazing how ingrained some of these habits become.

Multiple topic windows in ConnectedText 6

Just heard it through the grapevine that the forthcoming version 6 of ConnectedText will be able to have an unlimited number of view-only windows open.This is great news, as up to now the main limitation of ConnectedText was its inability to have more than one topic (document) displayed either in edit or view mode. It was one of the reasons why I needed another software for the actual writing, as it’s inconvenient to have to keep switching back and forth between the topics I’m writing and the ones I need to refer to during writing. Multiple view-windows will solve this problem.

Here is a screenshot of CT 6 with several floating windows open (hat tip Prof. Kuehn):

Workflows and toolchains

Apparently there is a word for the system that I’ve been constructing out of various software and hardware: it’s called a “toolchain.” Check out the use of toolchains in ethnography here and here. I’m glad to see that there is another researcher for whom ConnectedText works as a replacement for a mainstream QDA software (in this case Atlas.ti).

Academic writing process and associated tools

The main stages of my academic writing process:

1. Note-taking (empirical data collection or taking reading notes);
2. Analysis and evaluation, resulting in
   • an abstracted list of observations;
   • a selection of evidence (quotes and notes);
3. Organising these findings by: [2 and 3 can be done concurrently]
   • Ordering the list into a hierarchical outline;
   • Attaching selected evidence to list items;
4. Developing a separate outline for a draft (journal article or thesis or book chapter):
   • creating a hierarchical list of items (titles);
   • attaching a selection of evidence (quotes and notes) to the items as inline notes;
5. Writing the draft;
6. Adding a reverse outline (headings and subheadings) to the draft [5 and 6 are a more or less simultaneous, recursive process] .

Tools needed:

1. Note-taking (empirical data collection or taking reading notes);
   1. TOOLS:
   • CT (ConnectedText) – Clipboard Catcher (or clipboard extender)
   • Nebulous Notes on iPad/iPod Touch > Dropbox > CT
   • Dragon NaturallySpeaking (on PC) > CT
   • GoodReader, PDF Expert on iPad > email > CT

2. Analysis and evaluation, resulting in
   • an abstracted list of observations;
   • a selection of evidence (quotes and notes);
   1. TOOLS:
   • CT
   • AutoHotkey script: “copy to new topic with links“

3. Organising these findings by: [2 and 3 can be done concurrently]
   • Ordering the list into a hierarchical outline;
   • Attaching selected evidence to outline items;
   1. TOOLS:
   • CT outline (occasionally exported to and imported back from Natara Bonsai)
   • CT outline + linked CT topics

4. Developing a separate outline for a draft (journal article or thesis or book chapter):
   • creating a hierarchical list of items (titles);
   • attaching a selection of evidence (quotes and notes) to the items as inline notes;
   1. TOOLS:
   • CT Project Outline with links to topics

5. Writing the draft;
   1. TOOLS:
   • Outline 4D
   • Freeplane

6. Adding a reverse outline (headings and subheadings) to the draft.
   1. TOOLS:
   • Outline 4D

Update (24/01/2013)

The above chart could have been more representative by having an arrow between ConnectedText in Step 4 and Freeplane in Step 5, as the CT project outline would be exported as a .mm file and imported into Freeplane. This is an important relationship as the links to the selected CT topics will be preserved and remain clickable, thus turning CT+Freeplane into a virtual dual-pane outliner/notes organiser.

Also, Steps 5 and 6 should have been alongside each other or at least there should have been arrows pointing back from 6 to 5, as the reverse outlining process is part of the drafting process. After writing 3 or 4 paragraphs I immediately add headings and sub-headings and slot them into Outline 4D’s single-pane hierarchical outline.

Update 2 (24/01/2013)

Here is an amended chart, taking into consideration the above corrections:

Update 3 (24/01/2013)

Upon further reflection this is still not an entirely accurate picture of the entire process and set-up. An additional element emerges in Stages 5 and 6: the management of writing fragments that have to be removed from the draft in Outline 4D during interim editing and need to be kept apart. I may reuse some of these later, if and when the need arises.

Initially I just used a text document in NoteTab for this. But as the number of fragments grew, I needed a more sophisticated solution with the ability to split text into paragraphs and rearrange them in a hierarchical outline. For now I’ve been using Scrivener for Windows for this, which works well as a two-pane organiser of notes and also has the handy “split selection with title” command for breaking up a text into segments. However, I find Scrivener a bit of an overkill (and too slow on my Windows 7 system) for this. I’d prefer to use a lightweight, small footprint two-pane outliner that allows for the easy rearrangement of fragments.

Mindsystems Amode V3 under development

I was glad to find out yesterday that Mindsystems has decided to develop a new version of Amode. I’ve written about Amode V2 before, explaining why I like it as a project management solution. I can only hope that Mindsystems will preserve their unique tree + Gantt + calendar integration, which is the main reason why it’s my preferred project management tool. Mindsystems are offering a discount to existing and academic users, and the price should be even lower if you buy it from outside of Australia, as you shouldn’t have to pay the tax.

Update (24/01/2013)

Mindsystems have been kind enough to contact me today “To confirm the multi-view will be a strong feature of the new design.” That is really good news. I have tried several project management software but Amode is the only one I’ve seen where you can choose to construct your project in a hierarchical tree, a Gantt chart, or a calendar, and it only takes one click to switch between them.