For students, writers, and scholars, good annotation tools in an e-reader is essential.
The e-book format can be very advantageous for annotating e-books.
For annotating e-books, I now primarily use iBooks for these following reasons.
It also tells you how many pages are left in a chapter.
This is seriously great for navigating pages.
I’ll go into this more later.
Now compare the pagination of the iBooks e-reader to that of the Kindle app (the screenshot below).
Its menu slider doesn’t include the pertinent information included in an iBook e-reader.
The Kindle app only tells you the percentage of pages you have read.
Navigating Pages
One of the most frustrating aspects of e-readers is getting back to a designated page.
All e-readers I’ve used do open back to the last page you were on before closing the utility.
When you read an e-book for study purposes, you often compare information in different parts of the book.
You might also frequently check references as you read.
Having a way to quickly return to a designated page can a huge time saver.
Highlights
I believe the iBooks app is the only one that provides multiple color markers for highlighting.
iAnnotate, an e-reader app for PDFs, also includes this feature.
I assigned a definition to each color to make them more useful.
I really like this, but compared to the iAnnotation’s app, this feature is seriously underdeveloped.
First off when you bookmark a page, there’s no way to customize the title of the bookmark.
So you end up with a list of bookmarks but no indication of why you bookmarked a particular page.
In the Kindle app all your highlights, bookmarks, and notes are combined into one section.
The bookmarks are differentiated by their page location and the first few lines of the page you bookmarked.
It shouldn’t be difficult for both the iBooks and Kindle apps to include customized bookmarking.
