Tell us about your book

Posted by WSP
Nov 28, 2017 at 10:11 PM

I have written quite a few books over a long academic career (and now into retirement). As I look back, I realize that I have been looking for the ideal note-taking program since the mid-1980s, when I acquired my first computer. One of my earliest experiments was in using ProCite, a nice piece of reference software, because I discovered early on that it was possible to take and organize notes in it—not an ideal solution, but it worked for me over a period of several years. Eventually I turned to MyInfo, a really elegant note-taking program, though I was frustrated by its slow development and the lack of an iOS version, and in time I began to shift at least some of my notes into Evernote, which seemed to be very powerful but annoying in various ways, not to mention ugly and klunky.

In recent years I have also been making heavy use of OneNote, which is much more attractive on the screen but is slow in syncing and lacks any proper system of tagging. And, as I have mentioned here before, I am also now gradually moving all of my bibliographical references from other programs into CintaNotes, an app I admire for its speed, reliability, simplicity, and brilliant tagging.

Unfortunately I haven’t been able to abandon Evernote entirely, much as I would like to, because it still seems like the right choice for collaboration. In recent years my wife and I have been creating a digital catalogue of the personal library of William Morris:

https://williammorrislibrary.wordpress.com/

and Evernote works very well for that purpose. She and I have also used Evernote for collaborative note-taking to produce a couple of books, the most ambitious of which was *The Kelmscott Chaucer: A Census* (Oak Knoll Press, 2011), but in smaller writing projects nowadays (when I am the sole author), I tend to fall back on OneNote—and I continue to find CintaNotes ideal for compiling lists of bibliographical sources.