Advantages of Kindle Books for Researchers

Even if you don’t own a Kindle, consider purchasing the Kindle version of texts that you review for your research. Amazon provides a Kindle reader application for just about every platform, and Amazon automatically synchronizes your position in the text across your devices. If you’re reading a book on your computer and then need to hop on the subway to get to campus, you can easily pick up where you left off on your smartphone during the subway ride.

If you’re going into the field or just travel a lot, as many researchers do, you can easily take your entire library with you. It helps to have a Kindle (rather than a smartphone with the Kindle reader application) because Kindles consume very little power and their batteries last a long time. This feature is a definite advantage where electricity outlets are scarce.

If you’re using an academic workflow like mine, using Kindle books instead of hard copies has a major advantage: you can import your highlights and annotations on Kindle books directly into DevonThink. (If you haven’t read my post about academic workflows, I recommend to review it before continuing.) Reviewing a book on a Kindle is analogous to reviewing a PDF in Sente in my original post. In both cases, you can make highlights and annotations directly on the text. There’s no need to retype anything or write anything by hand. You only need to type your annotations. Admittedly, typing annotations can be a pain depending on the Kindle you’re using. But again, Amazon offers Kindle readers for just about every platform, and with a Mac or PC, you can type your annotations using a full keyboard. Once you’ve annotated a book, you can use Robin Trew’s AppleScript to import your highlights and notes into DevonThink. For some reason, Robin Trew’s website is closed, so I provide the file here.

There is a lingering disadvantage to this approach: the script records the Kindle book location rather than the page number, so if you want to cite a quotation, you have to do a bit of leg work to track down the page number in the hardcopy version of the book. Alternatively, you could cite the Kindle book, but I haven’t seen that as an acceptable practice, yet.