The paper vs digital debate is still going strong, and will likely continue for years to come. I have yet to decide which side of the argument I am on. On the one hand, I love the feel of a book or a printed article. I am also one of those monsters who folds over pages and writes in their books. However, I often misplace my books and articles. This is where I love the convenience of being able to open my computer or tablet and all my readings are right there when I need them.
The difficulty lies in finding an app that meets your needs. The default iBooks is certainly not my favourite and is one of the reasons I avoid doing readings on my iPad.
A month ago a friend of mine told me about an app he was obsessed with, LiquidText. He had never used LiquidText, and wouldn’t be able to with his new tablet as it was only available for iOS. So, I decided to give it a try. Immediately I knew I had found the reading app I had been looking for.
LiquidText provides an interactive reading and studying experience. As with most PDF readers you can highlight text. Basic stuff, I know. However, there is as fun an exciting twist. With LiquidText you can pull quotes and phrases into the margin where you can add comments and link thoughts and text together. The best part is, it links back to where you pulled the notes from. You can also adjust the size of the margin. There is no more frustrated scrolling, or desperate searching for the original page. You can also collapse pages with a pinch of your fingers, allowing you to compare distant pages and highlighted sections.
The free version of LiquidText includes all of the above. However, for a one-time fee of $20.99 you can upgrade to the MultiDoc version. This allows you to pull together excerpts from different documents, perform keyword searches across all of your LiquidText files, compare documents and make comments that refer to multiple documents. The final (and perhaps most important) bonus feature of the MultiDoc upgrade is the expanded and customizable colour palette. I recommend starting with the free version. If you love it as much as I do, the $20.99 is money well spent.
Republished from The Quill print edition, Volume 107, Issue 25, March 14th, 2017.