scholarly reading on the iPad – one month in

Not that this will be the definitive work…

I’ve had an iPad, like many others, for something more than a month now.  I haven’t talked about it much because I just haven’t been interested in justifying the purchase, or answering questions about whether it was worth it.   Like the first post I just linked to says, I’m think the answer to that question is still evolving even as I notice myself doing familiar things in new ways.

But I went to a conference last week, which was not only my first iPad travel experience, but it was one where I decided to see if I could get by with just the iPad, even though the presentation wasn’t done when I got on the plane and I had a bunch of resources I wanted to bring with me.

….Probably someone had investigated the phenomenon; no doubt she could look it up on the wrist.  She tapped out the code for the Journal of Areological Studies, typed in Pavonis: “Evidence of Strombolian Explosive Activity Found in West Tharsis Clasts.”  “Radial Ridges in Caldera and Concentric Graben Outside the Rim Suggest Late Subsidence of the Summit.”  She had just crossed some of those graben.

So, this picture has always sounded pretty good to me.  The ability to carry everything I might need and get at it whenever I have a question – that’s a type of heaven that connects me back to my very first smartphone purchase in 2005 which was justified by my desire to access IMDb from any pub in America.

Though, I have never been able to picture what the displays on the units in the quotation above (from Blue Mars) must look like that they let you read any kind of document, ever, on a unit you wear on your wrist.

Now I didn’t buy the iPad thinking that it would bring me into the world of ubiquitous scholarship – but as I started to prep for this conference I decided to see how close it would get me.  I brought a pretty big folder of articles and other documents along with me and found myself able to use them as much and as easily and I wanted to thoughout my five days on the road.

For articles, I was using this app – Papers.  I don’t have the desktop client installed.  When I first installed it on the iPad, I did so because the description said that the desktop client wasn’t necessary to use it – but that wasn’t true then and given that this app is definitely not free, I wasn’t happy.  A recent upgrade changed things, though and while I think this application would be a lot easier to use if I did have the desktop client, my experiment in using it without was successful.

You can add PDFs to your library in a couple of ways – using iTunes, or by emailing them to yourself.  I tried both and found myself leaning towards the email option:

Here’s the PDF waiting in my email on the iPad.  Click the icon to open it, and within the email client, I get button with the option to open the document in Pages.

Once in Papers, it gets a little clunkier.  If I had the desktop client, it would move everything over with metadata intact.  As I don’t – to add this I need to add the metadata myself — if I care to have it.  I don’t use this program (nor, I suspect, will I) to manage my citations so I haven’t figured out yet if I care about having the metadata beyond a descriptive title.

The journal name is easy to add, especially if you already have articles from the journal.  I can see the utility here, if I wanted to browse articles from a particular journal maybe?

I bought and installed the Keynote application on the iPad right away.  I use Keynote all the time – even when my documents are going to end up as PowerPoint, I create them in Keynote and convert – that’s how much I love it.  Pages, on the other hand, I have never warmed up to.  I hardly ever use it.

But, at the last minute, I decided that I also wanted to bring along several dozen interview transcripts.  I installed the Pages application as an experiment to see how this would work, and opened my email.  I was pretty surprised when the documents (which were Microsoft Word documents) displayed a Pages icon as soon as I had it installed.  Click the icon, open in Pages and I had access to all of my transcripts with practically no effort.

And it’s fun to browse through the documents –

So neither of these are free applications – Pages costs $10 and Papers $15.00.  For that $25, though, I was able to carry about twenty transcripts, a couple of dozen research articles and the full scan of a dissertation that I really didn’t want to carry.  Plus the movies, books, photos and music I need to survive the hours and hours of airplane time it takes to get back to Oregon from the east.  It’s not a research library on my wrist yet, but I can see the way there.