The day has finally arrived!

OK, so Scott, my brother in law, would agree that the day we are *really* waiting for is the day we all get flying cars.  But short of that, we now have a better way to read articles and documents than printing them to comment once, and then file/shred/pile/recycle.  The iPad app called GoodReader.  Good.iWare Ltd has an iPhone version, but I must admit I haven't tried it.  

Many people, particularly those of us in academia (or in science, or publishing) know this situation all too well.  We have piles of documents that we don't want to read on the screen because our eyes get tired *and* we want to mark them up for ourselves or others.  So we print them out *once*, mark them up with a pen or pencil, and then send those comments on to whoever needs them.

"I *have* to print them" we say, "because my eyes get too tired from looking at a screen.  And my free PDF reader on my laptop won't save comments for others.  And my laptop is too heavy."  

This app, on an iPad, solves all those problems, using the extremely common ".pdf" file type.

1. It offers a *plethora* of mark up options (follow the link for more screenshots).  Some of them are structured, typed, and pretty, others are more like marking up by hand.
2. It saves all those markups as a second version of the file, so you can share either the untouched original or the one with your comments.
3. An iPad is much lighter than a laptop.  And certainly much lighter than a big pile of papers or manuscripts or journal articles.
4. And its battery runs much longer than a laptop.
5. Tired eyes?  It offers contrast control so that you can make it nice and soft for your tired, end of the day, been staring at screens all day eyes (use "nocturne" or similar tools to do this on your laptop, too!).  And scroll down to see how the "zoomed in" view works.  Simple touchscreen gestures bring the whole column up to the width of the screen (in either landscape or portrait orientation).  How big would your stack of papers be if you printed everything at that font size?  

I think this is a key reason that the iPad is a better choice for academic types than the Kindle.  I know there are annotation features built into the Kindle, but that clunky keyboard simply can't keep up with apps like this one.  Furthermore, I think folks that prefer the Kindle screen simply haven't played with the settings on an iPad enough.  The one exception to that would be bright sun, in all honesty.

Happy reading!