Reading and Markup

Screenshot of a marked up pdf in iAnnotate

One thing I have found the iPad really useful for is as an eReader. I use it (and my iPhone) for reading books for both pleasure and work. The iPad is particularly useful for reading the many pdf copies of journal articles I scan/read in a week. I haven't actually printed a journal article since I got the iPad!
Now if  you are one of those people that highlights and marks up pdf's as you read them (either in wetware or software), the iOS eReader will disappoint you - you can't highlight or mark up pdf's within the app. Fortunately for you there are a few good apps that address just this issue. I use one of the the best ranked, called iAnnotate PDF. Using this app you can manage the pdf collections on your device, and within a pdf you can highlight, add notes and mark up the text in a whole variety of ways. Best of all, you can email/export the marked up pdf so that your mark up can be read in any pdf reader, or indeed send it in a format that allows you to edit your markup assuming you have a compatible reader (Acrobat Pro for example). If, like many academics you distribute lecture notes and Powerpoint presentations as pdf documents, your students will find iAnnotate pdf really useful. If any students out there are using iAnnotate to take lecture notes on top of pre-distributed pdf files, I would be very interested to hear of your experiences and would gladly give you space for a guest post.

Some pages from my notes, formatted as ePUB and displayed in the iBook Reader

Personally I don't mark up pdf's that much (at least not up until now), so I am happy with the eReader that comes on the iPad. Where I really like the eReader is for viewing books formatted using the ePUB open format. Interacting with the book (turning pages, placing a bookmark) is really simple and natural. You can highlight passages in the book, add text notes, search words and phrases etc. The tool set is not as rich as iAnnotate, but I prefer the really simple, clean, limited mark up tools. The tools only work with eBooks formatted as ePUB, not with pdf which is actually quite a pity. I was delighted to find that I can export files from Pages (Mac OS X version) as an ePUB file and then transfer to the iPad/iPhone. A couple of major advantages of the ePUB format are that the document resizes and repaginates to suit the device and orientation in which it is being viewed, and the reader can change the font size to suit and the document repaginates automatically. I took some lecture notes of mine that contained illustrations, opened them in Pages (OS X) then exported as ePUB and transferred to the iPad/iPhone. You can see from the screenshot above how they appear. Very professional, even though I say so myself (and with essentially no effort on my part). In the next couple of months I will be expanding this into a demo project and I will post progress reports here as appropriate.

iPad 2

Thinner, lighter, whiter. Do I need the iPad2?

The answer of course is yes! But not for the reasons listed above. Nor is it for the dual core processor, or even the new smart cover (even though I do want a smart cover). No, the reason to choose iPad 2 is for the camera(s) and Facetime.
The camera allows the iPad to be used as a data gathering device. This could be shots of a whiteboard, a page of a textbook, a photo of something from the lab, a short video clip etc. The fact that Apple are now making  iPad versions of iMovie and Garage Band suggests this is something they see the iPad as useful for too. And then there's Facetime. On a WiFi networked campus, Facetime will enable real collaboration among faculty/students at different physical locations - forget complicated video conferencing setups.
Of course this will bring problems too - bandwidth for one, if enough people are using Facetime simultaneously. And within a medical teaching environment there are all kinds of privacy issues around the use of cameras. If the iPads belong to the institution it's not so bad because the cameras can be locked down if necessary, but that isn't possible if the iPad is student owned.
Still I am looking forward to trying one and will post a review once I have had a chance to try one out.