I liked Crocodoc personal, in fact, I found it a quite fascinating tool as it mad it very easy to have several people comment on and discuss any pdf document. But apart from suggesting it to students as a tool for their group assignments, I didn’t really use it a lot. Also because already more than I year ago, it somehow looked like a neglected side product that may be shut down any time. And now my suspicion was confirmed in an email from the Crocodoc founders, announcing that Crocodoc personal will be shut down on 1 November 2015.
This prompted me to search for alternatives to Crocodoc and this post is a first and somewhat preliminary review of what I found. I was surprised to see how the market for online annotation services has changed in the last year or two. When I found crocodoc in late 2013, it was one of two serious competitors, at least when it comes to free services, but I think even among the paid ones, I could not find anything that might have suited me. I was looking for something that would make collaborative reading of texts possible for students and which would allow colleagues to quickly scribble some comments into a draft document. Here are my brief notes that I took down at the time:
- diigo doesnt seem to support pdfs properly (although its apparently possible)
- a.nnotate seems great for pdfs, but free version only allows 30 pages per month
- mendeley would be excellent but free version only has one private group with max 3 members
- crocodoc: also looks good but I cant get the annotations to work on the ipad. need to check on PC
So the only serious contenders for me were a.nnotate and crocodoc at the time, with my final preference clearly being Crocodoc.
Annotate has now launched a more attractive service called Annotate.co. It is certainly worth looking at, but two things turned me off right away: first, the free version only allows two users (and every commentator is a user) and the paid version is catered more towards business/ work teams and would be too expensive for whole classes of students, let alone schools.
Apart from Annotate, there are Notable PDF, iAnnotate, and Notable. I’m trying not to spend too much time comparing stuff, when it’s not necessary. Looking at the four of these pretty quickly let me settle for Notable PDF for the time being in order to try it out.
Notable is good if you want to share among a virtually unlimited number of people and are prepared to pay US $19 for that. It might even be possible to use one such paid account for several classes/courses, but I didn’t check how exactly this would work in practice. There is also a free account with “limited features” but I couldn’t find any information about what features actually are included. Anyway, the reason I am not exploring this further at the moment is that even in the paid plans, you can only leave comments on the documents- That’s it. And that’s not enough for me. I want highlighting and free drawing on the page in addition to Word-style comments. At least.
So, what’s wrong with iAnnotate? We’ll it’s pretty easy: it’s only for iOS and Android. Not for desktop PCs, i.e. no web-interface. No need for me to look any further further. But this minus can surely be a big plus if you need something that works well on your tablet or phone. I yet need to check how well Notable PDF works on those mobile devices.
As you can see, although there is a better variety to choose from it’s still pretty easy to make a choice. I will explore Notable PDF from now and I’ll let you know whether I ended up integrating it into one of my workflows and how. But since I wont be doing any teaching for a couple of years, I will not be testing it for teaching. Only research. Please leave a comment below if you have tried it for teaching. I am really curious if this could be a tool for teaching students how to read academic texts, basically by reading them together.
What I like about Notable PDF is that it can also function as your pdf Viewer (at least on Chrome) so that any pdf you open on the web will be displayed in Notable PDF, which means that you can start annotating it right away. However, I am currently using Adobe Acrobat Pro as a viewer (and editor) so I’ll have to see whether Notable PDF can really compete with this. But if you don’t have Acrobat, chances are that you will like Notable PDF better than the internal pdf viewer.
What also makes Notable PDF attractive for teaching is that it has a dedicated classroom plan for 2 US$ per student per year. It looks like the free version can bring you quite far as an individual and if you need more, the monthly plan for individuals is just $2. What I’m not sure is how well either of these versions will work for teams, i.e. peer collaboration. They have (more expensive) plans for that too, so there must be something that these plans have that the others don’t. Time to explore. Please share your views and experiences on this too
software for scholars 