Reading academic papers on the iPhone

Question

I frequently want to read academic papers while on the go. They're usually in PDF format, so I sync them to my iPhone with iBooks.

The problem is that most of the papers I want to read are in a two-column format that's extremely difficult to read on the phone's screen - I have to zoom in on a column, scroll down, then scroll up to the top of the next column and repeat.

Is there any software that will "flatten" out the PDF? I love Instapaper for web-based information; something that could turn a two-column PDF into a long stream of text and images would be great.

Answer 1

Goodreader for the iphone extracts text and images and fits them to your iphone screen and can be customized to your liking.

Answer 2

Calibre can be used to manage eBook libraries including PDF, and has the tools to transform them to other formats, including re-flow of text.

Answer 3

I agree heartily with the answers about GoodReader and (somewhat less heartily) Calibre. This is not the answer you’re looking for, but for academic articles, especially with LaTeX’s wide margins, my iPad is much, much better than my iPhone—usually the entire non-empty part of the page can fit onscreen in portrait mode. (For everything else I use landscape mode.) For reviewing my own LaTeX articles, GoodReader is much better than iBooks, since you can annotate. One gotcha: Apple’s Preview doesn’t display all annotations, so I (reluctantly) use Adobe for this.