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As more and more books appear in electronic form, I'm looking for a way to actually read them. Just staring at the PDFs on screen isn't enough. I want to:

  • Highlight important parts and put notes and bookmarks there.
  • Have some kind of synchronization mechanism, since I use one computer at work and a couple of others at home and of course I want to see my annotations in both places.
  • All this should preferably be cross-platform (Windows and Linux at least).

Is there anything - possibly an on-line service - that would fulfill these needs? Foxit reader has good annotation capabilities, but only on Windows, and no way to sync anything. Perhaps the sync thing could be accomplished by (mis)using some version control service like GitHub, but it feels a bit clumsy. Or then of course I could store all my books in an USB stick, but...

Any ideas/experiences?

Edit: I found that Foxit Reader 3.0 works quite well under Wine in Ubuntu. Add Dropbox to that, and there it is... Everything I asked for :-)

Foxit Reader 3.1 seems crash with Wine, but 3.0 works flawlessly so far.

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I fear you ask too much, but it surely is interesting – Ivo Flipse♦ Sep 29 '09 at 11:11

4 Answers

up vote 2 down vote accepted

You can store your books on Dropbox.

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up vote 3 down vote

I think that Evernote has capabilities close to your needs.

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Yes, if we can copy paste some portion from PDF then it is possible to use Evernote with ebooks. – Mahesh Sep 29 '09 at 13:37
So would you copy paste the whole ebook into Evernote and then read it from there? – Joonas Pulakka Sep 30 '09 at 10:24
up vote 1 down vote

After struggling with the ebook thing for a few years now, I've given up and just print out as necessary. Ebooks just aren't there yet compared to paper.

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up vote 1 down vote

I've been reading books on my iPhone. There's some nice apps for that. I can't interact with them (other than leaving bookmarks), but I've found I prefer technical books on paper.

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The Stanza iPhone app allows you to add annotations to eBooks. – jwaddell Oct 1 '09 at 23:21
Is it possible to read the same (annotated) books on a computer too, or is Stanza limited to the iPhone? – Joonas Pulakka Oct 2 '09 at 8:27

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