Paperpile: For Writing or Reading? And what it means for mobile

Discussion
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One of the interesting things that I see here is that there seems to be two ways that people use paperpile. And two ways in which they ask for support. The first is for having a better way to discover, annotate, read, and refer to literature. The second is for citation management.

I find that I am in the second camp. What attracted me to paperpile is how fast it could insert a citation. Not only do I find that overall I read much less, I also find that I can find the PDF that I want faster in Google Scholar than I can in Paperpile (or any other manager). What attracted me to paperpile was it’s tie in to GS: find, add, cite can happen in about 10 seconds, and I’m back on my way writing.

(The other thing that Paperpile does better than everyone else is download the PDF through my university proxy fast and with >90% success rate).

And it is on mobile that I find papers that I might want to read (best of intentions), but I find them in my RSS reader, or in my Twitter timeline. I want to quickly integrate them into a “to read” folder on paperpile. So some of the mobile solution that I need is for the app to have a share with button (for ios). (Or an email to paperpile solution).

But for me, the biggest issue is I want to write on my iPad. I find my Mac laptop a bore, full of a messy desktop and too much overhead. And so I’ve been badgering Paperpile for an ios Solution. And what they have is half of what I need.

The real problem is that Google Docs sucks on my IPad; it’s not the full experience. And when I go to BestBuy to look at the Pixelbook, it seems that it wants to install that same, broken version of G Docs.

Is this something that paperpile can even solve? I’m not sure. Perhaps allowing it to work with word (which has a very robust ios app) is what I really need. But I would love to hear what Stefan has to say about it.

2 Likes
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This might be slightly off-topic - but is it the case that the Pixelbook doesn’t run a “full” version of Google Docs? That is, one that doesn’t support Paperpile?

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I could tell in Best Buy. But I thanks Sell. I just completed an eight page proposal in a couple days entirely in Google docs on the desktop. I still love riding in Google Docs with Paperpile more than any other platform. But I really wish I could do it on my iPad too.

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Silly AutoCorrect. What I meant to say is I couldn’t tell in Best Buy. I would’ve needed to buy the machine, and I didn’t feel like doing that. It does seem like the piXelbook installs the Google docs app, rather than allowing you to use Google docs in chrome

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I went back to Best Buy. I does run full chrome with paperpile. It’s beautiful.

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A couple of years ago I suggested that Paperpile follow other reference managers in producing code that can be scanned on uploading to Google Docs. I like to write in plain text editors on my mac or iPad and would still very much like to use this feature. I see that PP now offers LaTeX citation codes (like this: \cite{Boyd2015-yt}) – if these could just be copied and inserted from the mobile app and then scanned when uploading to Google Docs, that would be perfect for me!

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100%. This is what I’m looking for, too.
If they can pull this off, I would be more than willing to pay a premium for a good iOS/iPad app in addition to the monthly fee.