Research is important to me. A lot of that is going to be physical -- going places, taking photographs, reading paper books that simply aren't in the digital domain. But a lot of it can move over to a digital book if the right tools are there. And boy is the Kindle the right one for that in many ways.

Let's take a look at managing some research on the same document -- the complete works of Shakespeare -- on three different machines using Kindle and Kindle apps.

<!--more-->I bought this -- through Kindle, naturally -- for the princely sum of 74 pence. It's the '<a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Complete-Shakespeare-Macbeth-narrative-Lucrece/dp/B003TXT5ZQ" target="_blank">Coyote Canyon Press'</a> edition, whatever that means, and looks like an open source Shakespeare very adequately packaged together with a foreword which -- cough, cough -- is revealed by the hyperlink at the end to be the entry on dear Will from Wikipedia!

I'm no Shakespeare expert but this source material looks good enough for this exercise. How many words are we looking at here? I haven't a clue -- Kindle doesn't tell you. There all 37 plays, 154 sonnets and some stuff I've never heard of besides, all divided sensibly into different works and sub-sections as a single document  with a staggering 51,46 'locations' -- the term Kindle uses for a chapter or section break I suspect.

<a href="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/kindle-search-desktop.jpg"><img class="alignright size-medium wp-image-5739" title="kindle search desktop" src="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/kindle-search-desktop.jpg?w=300" alt="" width="300" height="291" /></a>And, on the Kindle reader and through the desktop app, it's searchable. Let's look for the word 'manifest'.

How quick was that? Pretty much instantaneous really. I can go straight to the annotated entries in situ in a flash. The search panel stays at the side of the screen as long as I need it.

Think about it for a second. Yes, you could navigate the thing this easily as a pdf file if you downloaded one from Project Gutenberg or somewhere. But you'd need to spend money on a pdf editor to let you add notes and comments and stuff. And pdfs get big and messy -- the right format for a desktop isn't always the right one for a smaller screen.

The Kindle can handle pdfs I gather. But I'd rather stay away from them unless I find a good reason. If I want to go through a long digital document and find native format this suits me very well and runs very swiftly indeed.

Ah, yes. You're thinking. But this is Kindle on a PC. It <em>should</em> be fast. What's it like on the Kindle hardware? This... Hit menu, and choose Search this Book.

<a href="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/kindle-search.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-5740" title="Exif_JPEG_PICTURE" src="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/kindle-search.jpg?w=279" alt="" width="279" height="300" /></a>

Type in a search term and in under two seconds you get the results for everything Shakespeare wrote.

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That's a touch slower than my large desktop PC, but not much. For a tiny little thing like this I'm impressed. So what about notes? You can type those in very easily on the desktop and add a highlight too. You can do the same thing very easily on the Kindle reader though it's a thumb keyboard so don't expect to use it for editing or long chunks of writing -- not that I need it for this.

Here's a note added on the desktop, with some highlighting too.

<a href="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/desktop-note.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-5742" title="desktop note" src="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/desktop-note.jpg" alt="" width="490" height="144" /></a>

As I said in my original article, it's important to remember that what we're dealing with here isn't some local note. It's part of a synced document. So let me close down PC Kindle and open up my reader and say 'Show me my notes for this document'.

<a href="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/view-notes.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-5743" title="Exif_JPEG_PICTURE" src="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/view-notes.jpg" alt="" width="490" height="367" /></a>

I get a list of document notes and choose the one I want. Here it is, highlighted and with a little marker to show me there's a note there.

<a href="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/kin-note.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-5758" title="Exif_JPEG_PICTURE" src="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/kin-note.jpg" alt="" width="490" height="230" /></a>

I only just typed it on my desktop but here it is now on the Kindle, ready for the road if I was setting off for London or somewhere. And, of course, I could delete notes, add to them, create new ones and everything would sync back to my desktop when I opened that up.

Not just the desktop either. Here's my Android phone with the free Kindle app on. I can't search or create notes on it, but I can see annotations.

<a href="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/phone-menu.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-5744" title="Exif_JPEG_PICTURE" src="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/phone-menu.jpg?w=187" alt="" width="187" height="300" /></a>

Here I see a list of all the ones I've made.

<a href="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/phone-note.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-5745" title="Exif_JPEG_PICTURE" src="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/phone-note.jpg?w=300" alt="" width="300" height="174" /></a>

And here I see the actual entry, with the highlight.

<a href="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/phone-screen.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-5746" title="Exif_JPEG_PICTURE" src="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/phone-screen.jpg?w=210" alt="" width="210" height="300" /></a>

The note is that little blue mark by the way. If I tap on it I get the actual note itself.

That document synced between those three machine so quickly I barely noticed the transfer time. How would I use this? Mainly for making use of time that would otherwise be wasted. Reading on a train or at an airport and making usable notes. Keeping all my annotations in sync without even having to think about. Staying on top of the occasionally very complex tasks of managing book research.

Would be nice to have some input on the Android app (I've no idea if the iPad or iPhone has the same restriction). But any way you look at it, this seems to be pretty amazing.