Now that I’ve loaded up my iPod to half its capacity with songs and videos, I really thought my three-hour flight to Salt Lake City would go by in a flash. My every personal need for entertainment would be completely satiated by watching the plot twists of National Treasure (for the third time) or picking out the reverse recapitulation in the final movement of Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony (though my ear buds didn’t mask the engine noise well enough to hear the clarinet melody). So I sat on the plane thinking, I should have downloaded an audio book, or maybe an eBook. Really, what I should have done was to download those two JSTOR articles and finished up the lit-review for my article. But alas, my new iPod will not allow me to save a PDF file on any of its sixteen gigs of available space.

A quick trip to www.propeller.com shows me how to convert a PDF to *.txt format and upload them to the “notes” folder on the iPod. Of course, the text files obliterate the original page flow and layout of the PDF, and each text file can only be 4 KB in size. This does not seem to be the best solution since any kind of graphic (table, picture, musical example) will not be accounted for in the conversion.

So as of December 2007, my options for uploading information to the iPod touch are:

• Audio (www.textspeechpro.com would allow me to hear a computer-generated voice “read” the PDF file – I imagine Stephen Hawking waxing eloquently about French opera);

• Video (http://www.processtext.com/ allows you to convert PDF into AVI file, but then you’ll need something like Total Video Converter (http://www.effectmatrix.com/total-video-converter/) to switch that AVI into an MP4 to watch it on your iPod;

• Photos (now this may prove promising).

If I could convert a PDF into a JPG, I could preserve the “look” of the original PDF and easily transfer the files into a dedicated folder in the photos directory. Several options are available for this (including the above Process Text). I chose Digitzone’s simple PDFtoJPG program (http://www.digitzone.com/ pdftojpg.html). With its ability to batch process 100 PDF pages at once and its very simple user interface (as evident in this screenshot), PDFtoJPG does this one task very well.

Lucky for me, I carried my laptop to Salt Lake, so after downloading a PDF article from JSTOR, I converted it, uploaded it as a series of JPGs and, on the return flight, had a delightful time reading two articles on the sarabande dance. To be sure, the converted JPG looses some of the clarity of the original PDF – part of this is the automatic optimization iTunes imposes when transferring photos. Since there is no “disk mode” for the iTouch, you cannot select the “Include Full Resolution Photos” as you can for the nano or the fifth generation iPods. I wonder if a non-optimized JPG would have near PDF-clarity on screen.

Also, you lose some the page-turning ability of the original PDF, though flicking through the photos gives you some sense of turning the page. In neither case did the viewer automatically provide an optimum resolution for viewing on the iPod’s screen, zooming in to the text block so as to trim the edge margins. That would be a welcome feature of any PDF reader developed for the iPod.

In an era of one-click article captures, the PDF is truly the gold standard. It’s unfortunate that Apple did not consider the written word to be on par with video or audio during its R&D stage since the iPhone and iPod Touch have truly revolutionary potentials in streamlining communication. Perhaps Apple would do well to channel Gutenberg and Alcuin when considering software upgrades (of course, a Jailbreak PDF viewer already exists for the adventurous [www.mobileread.com]).