Personal Electronic Libraries: Problems, Suggestions, and Ethical Issues

Going forward, I want all the articles and books that I read to be in an electronic format that is (1) searchable; (2) annotatable, (3) portable (something that I can use and annotate on my multiple devices—i.e., my iPhone, iPad, laptop, and desktop); and (4) faithful to the print version (the fonts, tables, pagination, and page layout being identical to that in the print version). Now, there’s no problem here when it comes to journal articles. Nowadays, I can get almost every journal article that I want as a PDF file that I can annotate using Adobe Acrobat or Adobe Reader (or, on my iPad, using iAnnotate, which works great). These PDFs are faithful to the print version. And I can use DropBox to sync the annotations that I make on one device with all my other devices.