(Archived) Evernote Feature Request

[pkeesey 0]

I think it'd be great if evernote either had an epub/pdf reader that people could add notes to. These notes would then be stored in evernote tagged with meta-data about the book name page # etc. I am not sure how hard this would be but I think it'd be pretty neat!

[gazumped 11,666]

Hi - welcome to the forums.  Thanks for the suggestion,  but I think it would be pretty expensive,  if not hard,  to generate the code for yet another reader.  And there'd be some arguments about the content of the book being all too easy to add to Evernote along with your notes - unless the guys come up with some sort of copy-prevention gimmick to prevent the book itself from being copied.  And then everyone would complain about how Evernote has started to run slower / crashes more often because of the nanny software...

[GrumpyMonkey 4,319]

Hi - welcome to the forums.  Thanks for the suggestion,  but I think it would be pretty expensive,  if not hard,  to generate the code for yet another reader.  And there'd be some arguments about the content of the book being all too easy to add to Evernote along with your notes - unless the guys come up with some sort of copy-prevention gimmick to prevent the book itself from being copied.  And then everyone would complain about how Evernote has started to run slower / crashes more often because of the nanny software...

 

As far as pdf readers go, Evernote does fine (as far as I know) on Android, Mac, Windows, and iOS with reading PDFs, so I don't think there would be any new issue with copyright as far as that goes. Adding content (I am assuming that you mean annotations) to PDFs appears to be fairly complicated, especially if you want it done well. I wouldn't be surprised if something comes along via Penultimate or Skitch (Evernote products). However, I doubt they will ever be as robust as regular readers for the reasons you mentioned -- bloated code, a greatly increased opportunity for crashes, and reinventing the wheel. As you said, I already feel iOS runs too slow (sorry iOS team -- you are doing a great job, but it may never be fast enough to satisfy me!) so I don't want to see any extra features (unless they are ones I need!).

 

That said, it's cool that the OP made the suggestion. I'm simply saying that even if it seems quite doable (we are far along already), and useful (who wouldn't want an uber app?), there are reasons not to do it.

[gazumped 11,666]

Agreed that Evernote does the PDF thing pretty well - and is learning some nice tricks with Office formats too - I was mainly speaking to the general ePub and other formats type reader,  where the market is pretty full of dedicated electronics.  Evernote would have to spend time developing a new feature that might not be that widely applicable or (with die-hard iOS users like you out there) that well received;  didn't seem like a cost-effective use of resource.

 

And we'd all complain that there are a lot of things still "in the pipeline" somewhere that need as much resource as Evernote has available right now...

[GrumpyMonkey 4,319]

Agreed that Evernote does the PDF thing pretty well - and is learning some nice tricks with Office formats too - I was mainly speaking to the general ePub and other formats type reader,  where the market is pretty full of dedicated electronics.  Evernote would have to spend time developing a new feature that might not be that widely applicable or (with die-hard iOS users like you out there) that well received;  didn't seem like a cost-effective use of resource.

 

And we'd all complain that there are a lot of things still "in the pipeline" somewhere that need as much resource as Evernote has available right now...

 

It's pretty easy to convert epubs into text or PDFs, so I doubt there would be any major problems, though I don't want to see Evernote incorporate the code into their product (for all the reasons you discussed). 

 

Basically, not to put a damper on the OP's enthusiasm, but as you said, there are so many features in the pipeline that I really want to see, and I don't have a lot of interest in unsatisfactory solutions to problems that other apps address a lot more efficiently. On iOS, in particular, the small apps for small problems model works a lot better than the massive uber app / office sweet model in my experience. I'm not very patient in mobile with any lag whatsoever, and I am infuriated when there is crashing, freezing, etc.