Research Guides: ebooks at Hope College: Annotating/Taking Notes with Ebooks

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Ebook technologies have developed extensively over the past 10 years. Many of the ebooks purchased by Van Wylen librarians allow users to download entire chapters and to take notes, highlight, or annotate the text. Please review the many options below to optimize your ebook experience.

Software for Annotating PDFs

There are many great software tools for annotating PDFs and many of them are free.

hypothesis
Hypothesis enables sentence-level note taking or critique on top of classroom reading, news, blogs, scientific articles, books, terms of service, ballot initiatives, legislation and more. Annotations can be set to Private or Public, enabling both personal notes or shared annotation/commentary with a community of practice (e.g. students enrolled in the same subject, or independent study groups).
Preview (Mac, Reader: Free)
Preview is the built-in PDF viewer for Mac OS 10.5 (Leopard) and higher. Preview allows you to annotate PDFs (highlight sections, add notes or links), rearrange PDF pages, merge PDFs, and add keywords to your file for easy searching from Finder.

For added functionality, save your annotated PDFs to your Zotero library. That way, when you are ready to cite a source, you will have all the details available from your fingertips.

Evernote (Platform independent: Free)
See this handy guide for marking up photos and PDFs.

Ebook Central: Built-in Tools

Full details on how to use all the built-in annotation tools are available on ProQuest's Ebook Central LibGuide.

SpringerLink: Built-in Tools

SpringerLink allows users to download the entire ebook as a PDF or EPUB (you will need Adobe Reader to download the EPUB version).