ReadCube Papers

As of 2.70, it’s pretty ok, with lots of room for improvement. Papers 3 was significantly better all around, but since ReadCube owns them now, I expect ReadCube Papers will be importing more and more of their features. The most important features for me are there though, and import/search especially are working well enough for now. The reader view UI needs work: The carrier, clock, and battery icons aren’t hidden but merely white in full-screen. Highlighting and annotations are flaky, and there’s no undo button (you have to delete an entire highlight/annotation at once as an object, so small mistakes mean you have to redraw entirely.) Highlighting and annotation also just sometimes just stop working, and I’ll need to exit the pdf to get it back. Export only includes highlights and annotations on the first two pages for some reason. There aren’t options for switching from horizontal paging to vertical scrolling.

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As a former longtime Papers for Mac user, I’m frustrated by what could be a great product with ReadCube. I do like that my articles along with annotations sync to the cloud. But it drives me nuts that this sync isn’t clean when it comes to accessing articles on the web and on an iDevice. For instance, I may make changes to the metadata in one place (iPad) and its completely ignored on another (web). Or that I cannot rate an article at all on the iPad - I have to go to a web browser to do this. So I don’t have complete confidence that if I make any notes, add comments, or alter meta tag details, it won’t work across all platforms. I guess what I don’t understand is that even though I pay an annual subscription for this service, I feel like I’m working with freeware. The developers appear to have no sense of urgency in making value-added updates and their product timeline for the desktop based app is nonexistent. I have two wishes. One, that the developer behind Papers never sold out. It remains a far better product even though no development has happened for over a year. Two, there was a true competitor (no, I do not consider Mendeley or Zotaro competitors) that would either push these developers or actually produce a product that treats us researchers like valued customers. Maybe one day...but it’s clear that day isn’t today or likely to come soon.

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The app is great—but as of late, I can’t use it. For the past few days, when I try to login to the iOS app or the web app, I am redirected to a “Sign in & Register” page that notes that one can use institutional credentials if their institution has a site license (which mine does not), yet, it will only accept institutional credentials: I am unable to login via my account credentials (i.e. the email and password associated with my paid account), as when I do so, I get an error message that the email domain (iCloud) is not associated with an affiliated institution (obviously). When I try my institutional email, I am redirected to OpenAthens…yet my institution does not even use OpenAthens, and the login fails. Hence, I am unable to access my account, or my library. I’m not sure if this coincides with the release of the ReadCube Papers desktop beta, but until what I am hoping is a glitch is resolved, the entire ReadCube suite gets a single star from me—especially since my emails have gone unanswered, leaving me unable to do anything with any ReadCube product.

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Great start, but still has a lot of problems. First of all, writing with the Apple Pencil, or any stylus, is pretty bad. It’s ridiculous that there is no eraser function - the only way to erase is to individually tap the lines you wrote, and then click on a trash icon. There should definitely be an eraser function like all the other annotation apps out there. Second - the highlighting function keeps losing my previous highlights. I highlight a section, and keep reading. After a while, the section I just highlighted is gone and no longer there - it seems to be syncing incorrectly. Other than that, it’s a decent app that keeps your library synced in the cloud, but the whole advantage of using it on the iPad to annotate and read is very poorly done so far. I look forward to future updates to fix this.

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It pains me to write this review, which I’ve been postponing for weeks, but it’s now become unavoidable. I migrated to Read Cube from Papers 3 for iPad around January 2020, hoping for a better experience (Papers 3 was always decent at best). Around March the app became unusable, as it would freeze all the time. I deleted and reinstalled it, to no avail. Got in touch with the customer service. After some back and forth, they essentially gave up and promised a refund, while telling me that they would forward the issue to the developers. It’s been almost 2 months, and no developer got in touch with me (despite me sending a reminder), the latest software update did nothing to alleviate my issue, and I now have a library of 3k papers sitting there. A lot of time got wasted, lots of notes are now inaccessible, and the refund is hardly a consolation. Punch line: think twice before you commit your papers and books library to this application. Amen.