What I find fascinating is that most of the people ere are using Reader to read articles or an RSS fees. I’ve never used an RSS reader of any sort and I don’t typically save articles to read later. I either read them, or not. If I want tosave them that’s separate.
I use Reader to annotate books. It’s better than the kindle connection because it can handle books I send it that are not from Amazon. And I can set up my own custom yaml and metadata for the Obsidian annotations.
Things it doesn’t do that I want:
Round trip of notes to and from Obsidian. Updates I make in Obsidian in a particular book note will show up next time I read that book in the place I put them. This is especially important ans I oftenhighlight a section, make brief notes that I finish and expand later. I want to see them again when I come back to that book.
Ability to define the title of the book note fand the filename according to the Zotero naming rules with author last name first. It needs to handle multple authors.
Right and left side page clicks to more through a book not just via scrolling. Should support both with an easy way to switch between them. Scrolling in a long book is not good.
Page or location ruler. I need to know where I am in a book. Should be able to be turned on and off.
I think Reader might struggle a bit with this, if I’ve read your comment correctly. The app is a reading app, so it does assume you’re doing your reading and annotating inside it. If you add additional notes outside the application, how would it know? And even if it did know there’s no guarantee that the new notes would be in a format that it could use/present correctly? The books you’ve imported to Reader are copies of files you have stored outside Reader, so any changes you make are not reflected across apps.
I’m a bit confused by this, depending on the book format can you not name it in your preferred format before you import it to Reader? Does Reader have any function to rename files you import? (I’ve not tried.)
I suspect this would depend on the format of the book you’re reading, but I agree that it would be nice! PDFs have a button in the web browser to navigate a page at a time but it doesn’t work consistently in Safari on iPadOS and at present the same button isn’t available in the app that I’ve noticed.
Agree! I was thinking about that last night for @ryanjamurphy’s question about PDF readers with rulers (I’m not aware that any exist currently). In the web app Reader puts a blue bar in the left margin of the paragraph you’re reading, but the intention with that is to indicate to those using keyboard navigation where they are in the text. The same function isn’t available in the iOS apps, plus it wasn’t intended to help the reader read. I think I am going to email the devs about a reading ruler though because it’s an accessibility tool and given what they’ve achieved so far I figure that even if it is technologically challenging (I assume that’s why no-one except Kindle has managed it), if anyone can figure it out they will!
The Kindle highlight plug-in, which only works with kindle files has no problem with that scenario. So it is possible. They way it handles it is that highlights and annotations have block addresses in the Obsidian note and so you can make or add additional ones outside the kindle app and it works.
No, But there is the option to create the notes according to a custom format and set the name and title of the note. Which I am using but the only variable they have available for the author is formatted as first name last name. In Zotero I can specify the format and there is a vast array of variables I can use. Some handle multiple authors really well. The Zotfile documentation is particularly helpful in that regard. This is my set
Which results in files named like this:
2021-Posbergh-Huson-All_sheeps_and_sizes_-_a_genetic_investigation_of_mature_body_size_across_sheep.pdf
Readwise does not have all the various options, for example if can’t handle multiple authors well, doesn’t have a last name author variable etc. Those things are relatively easy to fix.
Not really. All reader software tends to adjust the format to suit the device so it’s more importnt to just allow a paging based on some criteria. It is advantageous to have books scroll when highlights span “pages” but it’s also faster to read books when clicking like a physical book.
Re PDF readers with rulers. Not a ruler per se but PDF expert gives an indication of what page you are on and how many pages are in the document. For MOOBI documents there is a total size and the device has to know where you are anyway to track your progress so you don’t always start back at the beginning so it’s already got a location in some format. To me there are only 2 things needed a total size in some form, I’d accept just a number and then a current location in the same scale. the scale doesn’t really matter to me. I prefer a ruler but even just a text display will work.
PS here’s a link to how to do robust custom file naming rules. You can even create your own set using JSON so very powerful zotfile Naming Rules
Not me! I mostly use it for books and PDFs too. I’ve added the newsletters, rss feeds, and read-it-later material that I need to read with focus and intention. My plan to make it my own little walled garden of content to save me from my magpie self.
I still use GoodLinks and News Explorer for my general interest read-it-later and rss apps, respectively.
Doesn’t work consistently with Apple News app. Often it just provides a “read in Apple News” dialog, without even a link, other times it imports the article
People have restricted content that goes to RSS for years (and actually when I ran a website more than a decade ago I did it too briefly, before realising that since I get annoyed with it I shouldn’t then inflict it on others), but it does feel like it’s becoming far more normal now.
In my case it does not serve the purpose they intend. If I can’t read your content in the format I prefer, I’m not reading your content. So yes, you never had my “clicks” since I was reading via RSS not on your site, but you also now lost any future sales if you were promoting any of your own material, etc. It’s a false economy forcing people on to your own site, and I hope in time the rise of this new generation of reading apps will force some websites to reconsider how they interact with their readers.
