Okay, so I needed a tool to annotate e-books, like, highlight stuff and scribble notes, you know? And I wanted it to work on both EPUB and PDF files because I have books in both formats. It was a real pain to find something that could handle both without messing up the formatting or being super clunky.
Looking Around
I started by looking for something free. I mean, who wants to pay for something if you can get it for free, right? So I tried a bunch of online tools. They were okay for basic stuff like highlighting text in PDFs, but they were terrible with EPUBs. Some of them wouldn’t even open the EPUB files. Others would just show the text without any of the formatting, which made it really hard to read. I wanted to see the images and all of the original content, too.
- First, I tried those online PDF annotators. Some of them were actually pretty good. You could highlight, add notes, draw on the pages. But like I said, they didn’t work with EPUBs.
- Then I looked for desktop apps. There were a few that could handle both formats, but they were either too expensive or too complicated. I just wanted something simple and straightforward, you know?
The Struggle
It was really frustrating. I was spending more time looking for a tool than actually reading and annotating my books! And when I did find something that seemed to work, there was always a catch. Like, it would work fine for a few pages, and then it would crash, or the annotations wouldn’t save properly, or it would mess up the layout of the book. I tried to draw with the mouse, but it was like, super inconvenient and difficult to get it right.
Finally, Something Works
After a while, I was trying all sorts of tools to see if they were compatible with a stylus. I was using my old Wacom tablet, but it was pretty old and didn’t work so great. So, I got a new stylus that could work on my iPad, and I was determined to use it with my Mac. Finally, one tool did work with the stylus, although it was a bit laggy. And I also needed to convert all of my EPUB files to PDFs. I found a free online converter to do this, and it was easy to do. Now I can easily annotate my files, and I found a way to organize them and group them together. I’m really happy I finally found a good workflow.
So yeah, it took a while, but I eventually figured it out. It’s not perfect, but it’s good enough for now. Maybe in the future, there will be a better tool that can handle both EPUB and PDF seamlessly, and has perfect stylus compatibility, but for now, this will do. If you’re also looking for something to annotate e-books, hopefully this helps you out.