Brad Stephenson is a Liquid | Author and Flow user who got in touch asking where Liquid | Reader is since he had seen it on the website. I apologised that it had been held back a bit and asked him why he was interested. His reply read like a manifesto for why we are building it so I asked him for permission to post his email and here it is:
Your mention of Reader as a helpful Literature Review tool caught my attention. My understanding, in simple terms: Reader would open PDF documents and allow copying of text within the app, then when pasted (assumedly in Author or another word processor) the bibliographic meta data would be embedded and automatically pasted with the text (I wasn’t exactly sure how it would be displayed and read _ code or text). Additionally the document could be read and highlighted in its entirety then Reader would include a feature which allowed only the highlights from the document to be displayed for review and assessment. This of course would make citing from PDF’s more streamlined and efficient.
A major frustration for me in completing my dissertation was in relation to citation software. My institution began with RefWorks as recommended by the library research assistant. The next year they dropped the contract with RefWorks, and recommended Mendeley, the following year dropping Mendeley and supporting Zotero. What I discovered was citations downloaded in compatible format from the library websites opened in Zotero were unreliably formatted. Instead of making the job easier it made it harder. If I were doing the project again I would probably build a bibliographic database using a spreadsheet, and manually insert footnotes. Your description of Reader indicating an ability to have the citation data embedded with the text which would be easily pasted and referenced for bibliographic or footnote usage.