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Kyith Says:

Here is a good article at MakeUseOf detailing why the author thinks that iBooks is a great ebook reader for annotations.

Granted the only app that we have come across now on this site dealing with Annotations have been GoodReader, I urge you to read this article to see its perspective

Pagination

First off, the pagination of the iBook is the closest you will get to the paper format. While the page numbering is not exactly the same as the paper format of the book, a slider at the bottom of the page tells you what page you’re on.

It also tells you how many pages are left in a chapter. This bit of information helps me to to determine if I‘ll have enough time to finish a chapter before I need to stop and do something else.

When you drag your finger across the dotted slider, you get to see the chapter number, chapter title, and pages of the book. 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).

For some odd reason, the page numbers of a Kindle e-book can run into the thousands, although the actual length of a book may be only a few hundred pages. 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. A percentage number is not very useful especially if you‘re reading an e-book for study purposes or for book group discussions.

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 application. That’s great. But when you’re reading an e-book and decide to “flip” back and forth between pages, it’s often very difficult to get back to a designated page if you don’t make a note of the page number.

You can bookmark the page, but that means you have to open the bookmark menu and then tap on it to get back to a particular page. 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.

Navigating pages is even more frustrating in the Kindle app because if you leave a page, the number of that page may actually change for some reason when navigating away from it.

In both the iBooks and Kindle app, there is a Resume button that when tapped takes you back to the last page you were on, but not necessarily the last page you were reading, or a specific page you want to return to. I would like to be able to stamp any page and then tap a single visible button to take me back to that page.

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.

The default highlight color is yellow, but it can be changed to green, blue, pink, or purple. I assigned a definition to each color to make them more useful.

[Read the rest of this article here >>]