As mentioned in a previous post, I have been uncharacteristically slow to adopt eBooks. Uncharacteristic in that I love to be on the bleeding edge of technology, always on the new OS beta’s, running different devices, trying out a new piece of technology. But for some reason I did not jump on the eBook bandwagon.

This holiday that changed. After reading a friend’s post on reading, I realized that I have a few additional options that I had not considered. Therefore, under the balmy Belizean sun, cold Coke in hand and hammock swaying in the gentle breeze, I embarked on the journey of learning how to read electronically.

As previously mentioned, one of my biggest hurdles for transitioning to an eBook is that when I read business literature, I like to read it like I did in University (or perhaps better than I did in University), making notes, highlighting quotes. I often find myself going back to old business books and re-reading parts, or grabbing quotes to share in presentations. What I found surprised me. Below are my highlights and how I have implemented eReading.

Document choice

The amount of choice is truly dizzying. All of the different document and book formats (PDF, .LIT, ePub …) can be overwhelming. After reading widely, I settled on two formats for all documents:

• PDF:  Inevitable. Analyst reports, Harvard Business Review articles, reports that I read daily, are all published in PDF.
• ePUB:  It would seem that ePub is the most universally supported. There are several other proprietary options out there, but I am going to do everything I can to avoid them.

Hardware choice

On the reader front, the decision is really between a dedicated reader and a tablet. I am running on an Android Tablet (Galaxy) as it has a wide range of software choices. I was worried that it would not perform as well in the daylight as a Kindle, but the ability to shift viewing modes makes it almost as effective. As a Kindle aside, it was amazing to see how many people had a Kindle at the pool. At one point, I counted 4 Kindles, my tablet, an iPad, 1 person reading a paper book and a guy with a bright pink 17” laptop resting on his stomach (smile).

All about the software

Rooting through which software to use is the real chore. In the end I settled on the following:

• Adobe Reader X:  Reading and highlighting PDFs remains an issue. I cannot find a good PDF reader for Android but there is hope. Adobe just released their ‘X’ version which includes commenting and highlighting for the desktop. A huge step forward. I will be forced to read PDFs on the laptop for a while longer. Hopefully the Android version with highlighting and comments is not far behind. I left a note on their forum!
• Moon Reader:   Tried a host of readers and liked this one the best. Great annotation, highlight and bookmarking software. The best feature is the ability to export through a range of vehicles, email, Evernote and others. Very flexible choice.
• Kindle and Kobo:   I have accounts with both, although I like the Kindle Android application better. The only downside is that it isn’t as flexible with sharing highlights and notes as Moon Reader. As an aside, Kobo has 1.8 million books available for free.
• Calibre:  And last but not least, I installed Calibre on my media server to manage the eBook library that is simply bound to grow.
• Evernote:  I have always been a big Microsoft OneNote fan. But as my OS and device patterns fragment, I have found the Microsoft only – desktop centric product less and less usable. I have started the migration to Evernote (again thanks to the previously mentioned note) and could not be happier. All of my notes sync’d across each of my devices. The only feature missing is the ability to skip specific notebooks on a desktop instance (i.e. Leave personal notebooks off of my work computer).
• Dropbox:  Makes it simple to share PDFs and other documents across all platforms – Windows, Apple, Android. You name it, they support it.

Not quite perfect, but almost. Only one piece left, magazines.