Watching the conversation, I was surprised how @satikusala catches up with Jon’s points so fast even if he is not familiar with the software. Yes, I have been the user of Bookends for over 10 years. It is the most sophisticated reference manager in the market. It is more than capable; and as @mwra noted, the developer is a wonderful human being. I have suggested many features over the years, almost all of them are part of the great software. That pleases me a lot.
But, @satikusala, you have a point. BE cannot compete with the Translators (you call them clippers; but, I think translator the formal name of the tools in Zotero) of Zotero. That is why I am using Zotero as my inbox; to collect references from thousands of websites. Those repositories which share pre-print articles are becoming very popular these days to tackle the inaccessibility of published articles. If you want to get the reference, it is a matter of days, if not hours, for sb to write a translator for that repository. Having a scapper for smaller sites like that in Bookends is difficult.
Zotero excels in getting reference data (of various quality) from the web. It is also getting better in a lot of ways. A good pdf reading and annotation capability has been added to it in version 6. That is really great.
Still, BE is miles a head in many ways. Mark has mentioned the regex search; like him, used to catch up faulty entries in my references–and many other things. The Format manager is another great power hard to compare in other reference managers. The format manager can be used to output anything, in anyways you like.
- BE also has a feature called Term List; which is used to check out the consistency of your entries. Some entries might have an author named as Anderson, Mark C.; while in other entries he might appear simply as Anderson, Mark. The same goes with Journals, for book series etc. You catch those inconsistencies using the Terms menu under Windows.
All the tools under global change are the true hallmark of BE. I was first convinced to commit to BE due to those tools. So powerful tools; To do those kinds of manipulations in Zotero, you need to know JavaScript. Otherwise, you are out of luck.
You can manage multiple libraries in BE; running them side by side. You an move references from one library to the other easily. If you have a lot of references, that is very important. BE is much faster than Zotero as well.
On my old mac (MacBook, from 2011; upgraded to drive and ram), loading 4000 references takes longer time in Zotero than loading 10000 references in BE. I don’t know if the new modernization of the underlying code in Zotero 7 bring a lot of changes. But, in Zotero 6, running over 10,000 references is merely impossible for slower machines (especially with a lot of add ons). BE is incredibly fast.
Another great feature of BE, which I think the Tinderbox team could probably learn from, is how to write an exhaustive and clear user manual. I haven’t seen any well-written user manual as in BE in any other software. I know that Mark’s TbRef is exhaustive, and that Tinderbox’s approach is a bit more complex to explain. But, a bit of more work to make things clearer, as in the manual in BE could benefit a lot of users (especially the beginners).
Overall, this was a very interesting discussion. I enjoyed watching it.