Comment by kendallpark | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kendallpark | Hacker News Reader

> There may be economic and environmental reasons to go paperless.

There are also practical considerations.

I much prefer physical textbooks but their bulk presents an issue. It's not fun hauling around one tome per class. I remember back in high school my backpack weighed 30+ lbs.

Last year I bought a 12.9 iPad pro as a textbook replacement. It works great (still miss the physical paper though). It has also greatly reduced the amount of weight on my shoulders during my bike commute to and from school. Nowadays I only carry my laptop and my tablet in my backpack.

Goodnotes can handle huge PDFs and enables me to write on and highlight the text. Voice Dream Reader is a great app to help slog through boring reading (Salli is the best voice I've found so far for scientific lit). I don't use Kindle-like ebooks for textbooks. Similar to what u/acconrad said, I need to be able to write on the text.

With all that in mind, my iPad pro is a designated READING device. I have notifications aggressively disabled for pretty much every app. No Facebook social media apps allowed. I won't/can't even log into Facebook on my web browser (someone else manages my password).

Do you write math or long notes, or just a few words? I have not found any stylus / tablet combination that allows me to write as freely as pen / paper, no matter how much I'd like to go digital for portability.

It's not too burdensome to add a notebook and pen to your kit.

When I was last in school, I also used an iPad (with GoodReader, GoodNotes & Voice Dream, 'cuz each is better than the others at at least one thing I care about), but I only used it for reading and annotating books & papers. I agree that it's not a great option as a replacement for a notebook.

What is your use case for GoodReader? I'm curious.

I don't take notes with my ipad pro. I only use it to annotate textbooks. Notes are taken with either pen & paper or my MBP.

I import my pdfs into OneNote and use a Surface Pro to annotate on them and take notes. This works very well for me. Pure notes, as in summaries of a paragraph of text i just type into a Word Document usually, however i have recently read that handwriting helps memorization, so i might switch to a real notebook for that kind of stuff.

> (someone else manages my password).

I'm curious what you mean by this.. someone set your FB password and has to log in for you in order for you to be able to access it? That seems weird. Why?

If you don't have self-control, remove the "self" from the equation?

^^^ this.

FB is a huge time sink and I rarely need it for legitimate matters. If I want to use it, my designated password-holder logs me in. I can always go through the reset process if I need it and they are not around. But the hassle of resetting is enough of a deterrent from absentmindedly checking my feed every half-hour.

Got it, thanks for the clarification

It's something I've considered doing to stop myself from compulsively checking it. Some people (me included) have low self control.

I don’t use it, what’s so interesting about it?

The allure of being less confined in the variety of social events and encounters that become possible by using FB/social media. Whether or not that ends up being the case, or whether it is rewarding enough for the associated negative aspects (remotely-induced stress, obsessive behaviors, anxiety, etc.) in the long term ends up being a factor as to whether or not someone keeps using it.

Thanks for the write up. To me it seems more like an endless “look at Me!”, with ads in between...

I am curious if you use something to highlight, write on web pages while reading on web. I haven't found ideal tool for that yet.

I settled on opening the page in readability mode on my computer, and saving that to PDF. I'd love it if someone has found something better.

I'm also looking for something like this as well.

"Better" is highly subjective but I just thought that I should note that if you're using here "on my computer" as opposed to iPad, you can do that on the iPad too if you're browsing the web on it.

Open web page, switch to readability mode, select print from the share sheet, unpinch on the page thumbnails to zoom them to full screen, open share sheet again and save the PDF in another app.

It's probably the best hidden feature in iOS.

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