Bookends 4+

If you use Mac and iOS, I think this app is worth looking at. It works very well for me. The main advantage of Bookends over other apps like Papers or the seemingly abandonware Sente is that Bookends saves your PDF annotations like highlights and notes in the actual PDF. This means that if someday, you decide to stop using Bookends, you can take all of you PDFs to some other system/app and all of you annotations like highlights and notes will come with you because they exist in the actual PDFs. With Papers, Mendeley, Sente, and all other apps I have tried, the annotations are not actually stored in the PDF but in a app specific database and cannot be easily bulk exported. Good luck transferring from Papers to some other app and realizing that none of your highlights come along unless you individually export every single one of your possibly thousands of articles.

Another great advantage of Bookends is its iCloud sync of the files. It all just works.

After using Zotero for years, it took me a little while to get used to Bookends. However, it’s been well worth the effort. It does almost everything that Zotero does, plus a whole lot more. Additionally, it’s easier to organize, and is visually more appealing. The one thing I miss is how Zotero has a browser extension that makes it super simple to create a reference for a website with all the information pre-populated. If Bookends adds this feature, it will be the best reference manager I’ve ever used by a long shot. Altogether, Bookends extra features are endlessly satisfying and useful. And for those who are up for a little scripting, Bookends invites you to be creative! I love this app and am really enthusiastic about using it for years to come.

I came to Bookends as a refugee from the once nearly perfect software Sente, which sadly went out of business. It’s been a difficult transition. Bookends overall is comparatively more wonky and less user friendly. But the biggest problem I have experienced with Bookends is the iOS sync feature. As I move frequently between devices (iPad, desktop at home, and laptop at work), I need instant sync as I pickup on a new device where I left off on an old device. As I use this for teaching and research, the timeliness of accessing highlights, PDFs, and notes matters. I have found that changes in highlights or attachments entered on one device sometimes requires 24 hours or longer to show up on the other devices. This may be out of Bookends’ hands, as it might be an iOS cloud sync issue. As an end-user, I don’t care whose fault it is because it ruins my workflow, and Bookends should address it.