But now I've discovered a way to read my ebooks that makes the experience tolerable.
My friend Jeff has been preaching the gospel of paperless books to me for almost a decade, but I've resisted for a long time. Now that I live in a place where it takes a few hours to just get to Borders and search for a tech book, I've started to cave. When I need a new tech book, I buy only the e-book. It's environmentally better, since all of the info will be outdated in six months anyway. Besides, it's not like I want to have a study full of classic web application books. Buying paperless books means I'm doing my reading mostly in Apple's Preview application.
The Bug Happy Fun Thing I found that has made reading tolerable in Preview is the Note Annotation tool.
It lets me make little notes of my thoughts as I read something. With tech books, this is great, because there are a million and one things that I read but then forget, or can't find again without searching for 20 minutes. Now, if I see something in a book I want to blog about later, or use in a project, I just add a note. When I'm ready to use whatever interesting page in the ebook that I've "Note'd", then I just view all Notes in the sidebar. No searching.
It's all about the little things.
Sorry, comments are closed for this article.