Kindle PDFs

I undertook a hefty freelance project this week, one that required a lot of research and a desktop folder full of journal articles in PDF. For fun, I loaded a bunch of them onto my Kindle to see if that would affect how quickly I could read and annotate the articles.

While the page clicking of Kindle was preferable to the stapled-page-turning of a printed document (and the terrible onscreen-scrolling of PDFs) in terms of reading, working with Kindle PDFs is a whole different story. The speed of note-taking is just not there compared to pen scrawls in a margin, the print is too small for scanning purposes, checking references is an utter bitch, and most of all, you can't haphazardly throw the Kindle down on your desk to type something when you get a quick idea.

I wish I would have had a Kindle in grad school, because, like I said, it's fantastic for reading purposes; all those articles I read week in and week out could have been stored in one central location, and I could have just cranked them out one after the other. But for the rigors of work, research and reference, paper documents are still king. And I think they will stay that way for a while. Technology, with all its bells and whistles, can't provide the same affordances that the disposability of cheap, one dimensional paper can offer.