Digital Bibliography

Here’s a video in three sections. In the first, I explain why I like PDFs on the iPad so much and introduce my workflow. In the second part, I explain how Dropbox keeps files sync’d across multiple computers, including the iPad, and how the iPad fits into that work flow. In the third part, I walk through the interface for Dropbox and iAnnotate on the iPad to demonstrate how easy (sorta) it is to use PDFs on the iPad.

Key Words: ipad, pdf, pdfs, dropbox, iannotate, email, tutorial, highlighting, marginalia, notes.

(p.s. Apologies for the screen-capture audio. I had the wrong microphone enabled. It picked up all the wrong acoustics from from desk.)

I spent most of the day scanning books into long PDFs yesterday. The books focused on two different subjects: the craft of physically constructing books (i.e. folding, gluing, sewing), and the future of books as they become increasingly digital. I’ve written about the latter at length already, and I’ll continue to address that topic in future posts. For this post, though, I want to think about a couple of aspects of scanning in books about handmaking books. At first, of course, its sort of tongue-in-cheek funny, or maybe even a little hipster-self-aware. Neither of which I was going for. I’ve thought a lot about scanning in books, why I do it, why I don’t feel great about it, and what I can learn about myself from this impulse.

First, there’s the cost. If I can afford to purchase a book (read: usually less than $20) I’ll almost always purchase the book in print form. I’m still not ready to buy ebooks as long as they’re weighted down with DRM, proprietary reading software, and no markup capabilities. So the print versions. Read the rest of this entry »