Thanks! For now will keep everything in pdf then… But if any power user or developer has better ideas, I’
m listening… All the best!
Yes, that is what I have ended up with (converting all ePubs to pdf and then adding them to DEVONthink). There are problems with this as you have mentioned.
An ePub reading/annotating app that could function without sucking the book into its own library would be wonderful. Unfortunately I have been waiting for such a tool for years. I think Apple actually did us a disservice with Books (then iBooks) in not giving an option to merely use it as a reader.
Does the ePub format support the ability to work with annotations and markup as thoroughly and robustly as the (fully proper) PDF format?
If not, IMHO, the inability to annotate and markup ePubs in Devonthink is not worth taking time to fix. Assure reliable, robust ePub → PDF conversion and be done with it.
A bit of background … I find the ePub format to be a horrible idea for doing anything that should be referenced in a certifiable manner. Tell me you will markup and hyperlink back to sentence 2 in paragraph 4 on page 3 of a PDF … done. Now try the same with ePub.
Just my 2c.
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JJW
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That’s exactly why an upcoming release will improve this conversion.
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No. EPub doesn’t even define bookmarks. Therefore, every reader does its own thing.
Yes. I agree that at the end of the day it seems BETTER for devonthink not to work with epubs. It is annoying and time consuming to have to use calibre for the conversion but it is done only once. And then I agree: PDF is a better format for storing annotated documents.
So, I ended up storing both pdf and epubs in my DB but using only the former. The only issue is if I want to read stored epubs in an iPhone or iPad mini - then epubs are handy. iBooks will NOT open without internet, even if the pdf is already stored. I found an alternative: TI-READER. It seems they are not updating it anymore but it works great for now. Just wanted to share. Thanks to all of you that commented!