Reading and note-taking app for iPad and Mac that focuses on organising highlights, notes, creating flashcards and mind maps.
MarginNote 3 is one of the leading representative of the huge churn of innovation in reading that started on the iPad and is now spreading to the computer. It is a perfect example of why people shouldn’t just open a PDF on their tablet or phone in the default application.
With a bit of practice, it enables much deeper engagement with text. It makes it possible to organise and export highlights and annotations or even create flashcard from them.
It requires a one off payment separately for the iPad and Mac but it also offers an annual subscription for features such as OCRs.
It has rudimentary but functioning text to speech to enable listening but it is not its primary focus (compared to other apps).
Of all the PDF reading apps on the iPad, it has probably the most features focused on learning from text:
Unlike many others, it does have functional built-in support for text-to-speech even if it is not easy to surface or a best-in-class implementation.
It has a desktop app on the Mac which makes it easy to sync for those who use both.
MarginNote is not the most expensive app but it is not very cheap. There is a free-trial (about 7 or 14 days) but no free tier. This is not that unusual on the iPad, though.