Highlighting PDFs and E-Texts

Healthcare professionals read journal articles in PDF format constantly. You may be wondering what are the alternatives to printing out a hard copy for highlighting PDFs and e-texts electronically.

iAnnotate is an application written for the Apple iOS. It can run on iPads and iPhones. Reviews by medical students and the Chronicle of Higher Education have been positive. The iAnnotate app enables touch screen highlighting of PDFs on an iPad with the ability to add a note using the pop up keyboard. iAnnotate integrates your annotations directly into the PDF such that they are able to be read on a standard PDF reader like Adobe Reader or Preview, provided that you download the free Aji PDF Service software to your PC or Mac. This app has the added ability to transfer PDFs via email. Although this video shows someone using their finger, this would work better and feel more natural using a stylus such as the POGO sketch. At the time of writing, the app publisher Aji does not offer a version of iAnnotate for other operating systems such as Kindle or Nook e-readers.

Highlighting e-texts is a similarly enticing proposition. Nook and Kindle both enable highlighting of e-texts that are in their respective proprietary e-text formats (.pdb & .azw files), but the interface is clunky and relies on button clicks to place the cursor and highlight text one...character...at...a...time. iPad uses the iBook application to download, view, highlight and annotate e-books in the EPUB format purchased from iTunes, but it has as yet not the breadth of B&N and currently makes available popular reading titles not textbooks.

Laptops and Netbooks continue to offer viable alternatives to iPad. The Chronicle of Higher Education published an excellent article and follow-up article recently on software that lets you highlight and annotate PDFs on PC and MAC. Barnes and Noble recently released NOOKstudy for download to computers running Windows or Mac OS. The software has various tools including the ability to highlight text using a mouse, and to add notes, but only for e-texts you buy or rent from B&N in their e-reader (.pdb) format.

As this is a rapidly changing area, keep up to date with new developments by reading the Chronicle of Higher Education, CNET and the New York Times Personal Tech section.