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A painless way to read and annotate journal articles


I am much more comfortable reading a book or my Kindle than trying to read long pieces on my laptop.

When it comes to journal articles, you might think there is no alternative. But there is. I don’t know whether everyone already does what I’m describing here, but perhaps it will help a few people.

There are two stages: first, transferring the journal article to the Kindle; and second, transferring the notes and highlights made on the Kindle back onto your laptop for integration with the rest of your work.

Neither stage is complicated, but nor are they particularly intuitive. I am using a MacBook, so the details may be slightly different on a Windows computer.

You start by accessing the journal article on your laptop, and then do this: 

  1. Download the article, preferably as a PDF - but other formats will also work.

  2. Go to Amazon’s Send to Kindle webpage - https://www.amazon.co.uk/sendtokindle - to upload the file. 

  3. Drag and drop or select your downloaded file - to produce a screen like the below.

  1. Click the little chevron to the left of the file name. If the file you have uploaded is a PDF, choose “Make layout adjustable” instead of the default “Keep original layout” and make sure the slider “Add to your library” is switched on. 

  2. Send the document. 

It should shortly appear in your Kindle library, ready to be downloaded onto your device like any other book or book sample. Passages can be highlighted and notes added in the usual way.


How to make use of what you have selected during your reading 


The second part of the process allows you to integrate highlights and notes into the rest of your work, whether you keep that in cloud storage or on your laptop.


There are two ways to access your Kindle on a laptop. You can download the Kindle app, which shows a laptop-friendly version of texts and includes any notes and highlights you have made on the Kindle as well as allowing you to add new ones on the app. 


There is also a Kindle Highlights web page - https://read.amazon.com/notebook - where you can see all your notes and highlights from your Kindle. But it doesn’t display anything related to documents you have uploaded, so is not relevant here. 


To reintegrate your Kindle highlights and notes with your laptop with Kindle app.


  • Hover your mouse at the top of any page to bring up a navigation bar in relation to that document. 

  • Click on the three dots at the top right and then select Annotations. 

  • This will produce a small window below, including a download icon. 

  • You can choose a citation style, or none, and then email the document to yourself.



This is the only slightly clunky aspect of the process: you have to receive your notes and highlights as an email attachment. Download the attachment from the email. You can then open it in Word. 


It won’t be the most elegant Word document you have seen but with some font size changes and liberal use of Find and Replace to get rid of multiple occurrences of things like Highlight(yellow) it will look pretty respectable. 


This reads like a complicated process, but doing it is simpler than explaining how to do it. The result will liberate you from your laptop. Perhaps some of the pleasures you associate with Kindle reading will put you in a receptive frame of mind when reading work-related content.  


NB: For academic work you will need to keep the original PDF. Conversion to Kindle format will normally lose the article’s printed pagination. Kindle “locations” are no substitute for the journal page numbers, so citations will need to be checked against the original PDF.


 


 


 

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