Just a few thoughts here from someone who has been with Paperpile since it’s early days when the founders brother announced in on Reddit.
Paperpile does one thing very very well - it grabs papers and puts them in the cloud. It lives in the browser. If you ask me, this was its simple trump card. Nothing else does the job of sequestering papers better than Paperpile. And for this, I’ve loved it.
Now comes the sucky part. Paperpile only works with Google Docs. This makes it instantly useless in the workflow of about 90% of academics out there for ‘cite as you write’. I don’t know why, but over the years it feels like the founders are really not understanding the idea that Google Docs is not exactly the most pleasant, or efficient or feature packed word processor out there. Ask 5 people and they will give you 5 different answers on why they prefer Word/Writer over Google Docs. The expansion of Word features with Word Online, OneDrive and the ability to collaborate has eroded any miniscule charm Google Docs had even further.
It seemed last year, the company finally started to get the message and started a beta program that involved a Word add-on. I was hooked. If I had Paperpile with the capability to cite in word - the search for the proper citation manager was over. Alas, the promised Word beta seems to have been shelved in favor of a mobile application. Really…because people write papers on the bus on their phones and tablets. Right? Oh no, they said, it is for reading papers.
I realised I was doing it wrong. Here I was thinking Paperpile was a citation manager, when what it really is ,is apparently just a PDF reader. To get a proper citation manager , I had to hunt until I found http://f1000.com/work/
This one actually does everything that Paperpile does - Google Docs, saving articles etc. AND it has a Word add on, Libreoffice add-on and an offline desktop client. Brilliant. The catch? It’s $9.99 per month…about 3 times more than Paperpile’s $2.99 per month. I honestly do not think that the extra 84$ per year is a serious dent in the grant budget of any academic. Guess where the geese are flocking?