Docs at Long Last Tamed

Among my myriad sloppy life queues (books unread, recordings unheard, to-do items undone, etc) are a slew of miscellaneous bytes of e-reading material collected over decades.

The oldest are text files and word files. Then there was the flood of saved web pages and various DOC attachment types. Then a blizzard of epub and mobi files which were imported into Kindle or Apple Books ("The Great Forking" which launched my persistent sense of fragmentation).

At one point, I even resorted to publish-on-demand, funneling it all into a word doc and printing a one-off 900 page bound softcover book titled "Catch-Up Reading". So hopeful! So young! But the formating was too wretched to read, and I never even cracked it open.

Then arrived iPad, filling me with unification dreams. But the document-reading apps, aiming to handle all formats, were kludgey, annoying, hard to synch, and generally maddening.

But it's gotten better!

At this point, the old gutbucket e-reader apps seem quaint and moldy. The action has coalesced around the victor format PDF, which seems likely to dominate for years (and remain backward-compatible long thereafter). Also, it's super easy to convert practically anything into PDF as a top-level feature on any platform.

And there are excellent PDF readers for mobile, benefitting from specializing in the single format. I use Readdle's much-loved PDF Expert.

Problem: it overlaps confusingly with Readdle's "Documents" app. If you have both on your device, it's like trying to catch a basketball passed back and forth by two 7 foot tall Harlem Globetrotters. You can't tell which app will open your document, or which you're even in.

Advice: tolerate the confusion and try both. They're a bit different, so choose your favorite (PDF Expert helps you annotate better, Documents has more presentation options) and nuke the other to eliminate confusing confusion.

Both apps offer a panoply of flexible options without interfering with the nice, clean presentation. It's finally a mature field.

So here's what I did:

I opened my txt and doc files and "printed" them into pdf (you can automate this process via scripting or shortcuts), and lobbed the PDF exports into a gutbucket folder.

Same for saved web pages: I opened in-browser, "printed" to pdf, and tossed in the gutbucket (also automatable if you'd like). Epub and mobi files and other kooky archaic ebooks formats go into Calibre, a freeware converter, which interprets them into PDF. The conversion can be done in batches (i.e. convert many ebooks at once). Note, I dimly suspect Calibre could have converted all those txt/doc/html files, too, but I'm not claiming to offer the perfect workflow, just explaining how I did it.

As I went, I trimmed away blank or useless front and back matter (while "printing" to PDF, select a custom page range, leaving off crap pages at either end, e.g. you might "print" only pages 2-54 of a 57 page document). If I failed to clean up every last one, I could go through later, re-"printing" (using that same custom page range trick) to a new, sleeker PDF. Garbage reduction is essential for making device-reading feel less sacrificial. Steve Jobs was right; sleekness helps you feel/work/think sleeker. Be kind to your future self!

I gave each PDF a thoughtful title, and organized them into sub-folders ("Fiction", "Sci-Fi", "Short Stories", "Politics", "Funny", "Nerdy", etc), and then shot the whole crop up into The Cloud. Then I set my mobile reader app to draw from the highest-level folder, and....that's really that. From there, you're pretty much good to go. PDF Expert and Documents quickly index your stuff, and it looks great (if your titling was smart, and you diligently removed garbage pages).

Within the reader apps, you can do further organization - adding tags, amending file descriptions, and otherwise screwing around with the docs, all without touching the actual pdf files. This is both awesome and horrendous. Awesome, because there's no "lock-in"; you can still use those same docs with any other reader app that ever shows up; all the changes were internal to the app. Horrendous, because if you do switch apps, you'll lose that metadata. This is one reason to be super thoughtful about titling the PDFs, and to smartly arrange them in sub-folders. Give yourself a fighting chance!

I have, alas, not yet reached The Singularity. Whole books bought as Kindle books still live in Kindle (the device as well as the app). And I still keep a long queue of web bookmarks in Pinboard, and some of those are flagged for online reading via Paperback. This is my remaining doc fragmentation, and I'm not sure whether to process that writing into PDFs, or to turn all my PDFs into Paperback links. I need to find a fourteen-year-old to consult with; can anyone rent me their kid for an hour?

Minor remaining fragmentation aside ("split in two" is better than "shattered into a zillion pieces"), I no longer need to dig into the Science/Astronomy/To-Read folder of my Mac to find astro stuff I've been meaning to read. Everything's on my iPad. It feels good. I feel sleek!