With the success of the Kindle I and Kindle II still fresh in its memory, Amazon decided to take its line of e-ink digital ebook readers to the next level with the newly announced Kindle DX. The Kindle DX is basically a supersized Kindle II, but it comes with a number of interesting improvements.
The Kindle DX is not only larger than its little brother (a 9.7″ display as opposed to the 6″ one on the Kindle II), but also comes with accelerometers that rotate the display content according to orientation, something we’ve seen on many of Apple’s portable devices already. It also has a built-in PDF renderer, so you no longer need to convert PDF files in order to read them on your Kindle. The DX will sport a rather hefty price tag of 489 USD.
The Kindle DX is aimed squarely at the educational market, and several pilot programs built around the device will start at several American universities. Amazon has struck deals with the three major suppliers of textbooks, ensuring a decent supply of material. How exactly the pilot programs will work has not yet been detailed. Several newspapers in the US will also start pilot programs with the Kindle DX, offering discounts to people who are willing to commit to longer-term subscriptions.
Back in the mid 1990s, my father, who worked at a major newspaper company here in The Netherlands for well over 30 years, already showed me the future of the newspaper. Fifteen years ago, they were already showing around prototypes of Kindle-like devices (but with LCD displays, not e-ink) which would replace the traditional newspaper. Customers would get a little disc in the mail every morning the contents of which could be loaded onto the device.
It sounded like total science fiction to me back then, but my father always remained adamant that that was the future of the newspaper. Working at a newspaper for so long, he realised full well that newspapers would face some seriously harsh times in the future, and as it turned out, he was right: basically every major newspaper in The Netherlands is seeing a steady, and sometimes even sharp decline in readership. Costs have to be cut everywhere, which affects the quality of reporting as well.
To this very day, my father and I sometimes talk about that demonstrantion he saw 15 years ago, and how reality is finally catching up to the science fiction of the past.
Meh! A niche piece of hardware.
You say “niche” like it’s a bad thing.
My reaction:
I’m interested in buying on simply as a pdf reader despite not living in the US and thus not being able to use most of its features.
Niche hardware? Or, latest fad gadget for morons to blow money on?
Yeah, reading is for morons. Right?
The Kindle is extremely useful. Instead of carrying plenty of heavy books, one gadget can stores them all and is pretty lightweight. My issue in the past was screen size, but now the Kindle is perfect for me.
I wanna see some reviews how it handles some random PDFs (normal, scans etc.)
If it does well I might buy it next winter… but then again the E-Ink technology is still advancing pretty fast and I think we are not at the point where you can just buy and be happy(Digital still camera had that point a few years ago for normal consumers.)
If I buy I want it to last, cause it is far from cheap.
The main reason I never considered buying a reader like Kindle is because it tends to mess up the page layout. It never looks like the original book, and lines get wrapped in an unpredictable way. Obviously Kindle I and II have a smaller screen than my books, and the result is very disappointing. Here’s a screen shot from Amazon:
http://tinyurl.com/chomvl
Note how lines get wrapped, it’s worse than an ASCII file. I’d be extremely annoyed to read such unformatted garbage.
This probably doesn’t matter for normal people reading stuff like novels, but it’s a no-go for the technical book audience. One would hope that this gets fixed in Kindle DX, but I’d have to see it to believe it.
Note how the Kindle DX can be turned sideways to give you an extra-wide page, making it better suited to textbooks.
It looks pretty sweet; I’m rather tempted to buy one, especially if my newspaper (NRC Next) ran a digital version that works on this.
Actually there is one newspaper in NL that has been running a digital subbscription on an e-paper device for a couple of years now; NRC (the parent newspaper of the newspaper I’m reading) has been tied to the iRex Illiad for quite a while now.
It will be interesting to see whether this is a one-off and an experiment or the start of something big among news outfits and magazines generally as well as books – in which case enter Apple with an iTablet or iReader type of appliance, at a guess. Colour done as neatly as mono and really well thought out software. Enough connectivity to the web et al thrown in to help justify those premium prices.
Edited 2009-05-06 22:18 UTC
Until someone invents DRM for paper, the Kindle is going nowhere.
There’s too many restrictions with the device to warrant any mass-exodus, let alone the price. Can only use the Amazon store, can’t browse the open web, can’t download whatever you want.
Competition wise, someone needs to come out with an A4 sized reader that cuts the crap and is as ‘flexible’ and practical as the real paper it replaces.
Never stopped the iPod.
You seem to be operating under the assumption that the Kindle is supposed to somehow replace paper. As someone in the market for a device like this I have to disagree. The Kindle doesn’t replace paper, it complements it. I have no intention of replacing either my (paper) notebook, my newspaper and magazine subscriptions or any of the books on my bookshelf. What I’d like to replace are the several binders of printed out pdf that I have. I’d also like to have copies of certain reference books so that I don’t have to carry several kilos of paper. So as long as it can open my pdf and html files in a reasonable way I’m interested. Everything beyond that is secondary.
I just did an order at Amazon for some books. While going through doing a search for books I might be interested in I saw that many had a kindle version available. What struck me was that the price was simply not a bargain. In fact, of my order, 8 of the books I bought used in “like new” condition, and one at bargain price. Rough estimate is I saved over $60-70 easily by NOT purchasing Kindle versions, not too mention the price of the device itself. I just do not see or understand the market for this.
I am sure someone will make some environmental argument on how this will save trees. That is until thousands of these Kindles get dumped in some land fill where the chemicals leak and kills off ALL the wildlife, including the trees….and the cute bunny rabbits! My god people, think of the bunnies!
Some people appreciate not having to carry around those 8 books.
I could see this as a killer gadget if the price was cheaper. A cheap kindle would be an ideal platform for school kids, for example: It allows the school district to keep their books up to the latest revision, and kids don’t have to carry a ton of books back and forth.
For the occasional reader, something like a kindle does not make that much sense right now.
I assume that with time prices will come down significantly, in both the device and the content. I guess the kindle introduces the “early adopter tax”
The only person who will be carrying those 8 books will be the UPS delivery man.
Well, I did, in my high school days. So I guess I’m one person who would have carried around a single Kindle rather than a bookbag that weighed almost as much as I did.
On Amazon.com, you can get Asus Aspire One 10.1″ COLOR LCD, 160Gb HDD, WindowsXP for $345. Just add a software eReader and you’re done. You’ll need to find a free wireless Internet hotspot while on the move if you want to buy stuff. It’s not as slim, sized at 7.3 x 10.2 x 1.3 inches.
The Kindle DX, for $489 give you 9.7″ of gray scale e-ink screen, low storage space, but a nice 2 week charge battery. And it’s wireless anywhere (free). Oh and it’s slim, sized at 10.4″ x 7.2″ x 0.38″
All in all, both take the same amount of space to carry, the Netbook is a little bit more heavier. The Kindle will last for weeks on a charge but can’t run OpenOffice (MS Office) or FireFox, or Skype, IM, you name it. Just how many eBook you can carry with you on the 160Gb HDD? More than the Kindle DX. And the color LCD is not THAT bad for eyes and it’s in color.
So you don’t get the “iTune” like experience of buying eBook while using your Netbook, true, you only get that easy with the Kindle.
But is it all worth it? Why pay $489 eReader -VS- $345 Netbook ??
Edited 2009-05-07 00:53 UTC
Formfactor and battery life would be enough to swing it for me. Before I’d even consider using a netbook or laptop as an ebook reader it would have to be a tablet. And even then the weight might be a factor. My X41 thinkpad tablet is nice to read on, but it’s weight and size is far from ideal.
Then there is battery life. Just being able to go for days without re-charging makes it significantly better than a netbook to me.
Or try the old fashion book. Lite weight and battery life of infinity.
I have several hundreds, in addition to countless binders with printed out pdfs. They are no where near light weight and an epic pain to carry around. Even a single book significantly is heavier than the Kindle.
Obligatory link:
http://www.penny-arcade.com/images/2009/20090309.jpg
Need to find the Isaac Asimov essay on the same theme. Haven’t read it yet, just keep running across references to it.
Because I want an eReader not a netbook?
I’ve been waiting anxiously for a large-format Kindle for some time, since most of my reading is in the form of technical books (programming) and on the order of 300-1000 pages.
They’ve made the screen size adequate, though I’d really like to see the keypad integrated into a touchscreen (yes I know e-ink isn’t built for refresh, but it can’t be that difficult to put a small LCD layer near the bottom for the keypad and interactive elements).
The problem they really have is price, and that’s largely because they force every consumer to subsidize the GSM downloading that they may not actually care to use. I’d much rather have a WiFi-only or USB tethered Kindle if it was cheaper. It would be nice if I could download from anywhere, yes, but I am rarely in such desperate need to download a book right this moment, and even on the go a WiFi hot-spot is never more than a couple miles away — besides, think of the deal they could work out with Starbucks!
I was, perhaps foolishly, hoping that this new kindle would intro at the price of the Kindle II, dropping that down to 249, but they’ve certainly missed that mark.
I’d love to have my entire library on the go, and in a form that doesn’t make me transport half a dozen very heavy boxes when I move, but for 489 bucks that’s a hard sell, especially with the economy the way it is, and the fact that, even if you buy books new, the kindle versions are only 10 bucks cheaper at most — I’d have to buy at least 2 dozen books before I’d consider my purchase to have been worthwhile.
Then there’s the whole DRM issue… Amazon has Apple in their eyes and want’s to become the iPod of books. Of course, even Apple has conceded lately that the customer wants DRM-free, and ultimately the customer gets what the customer wants or it goes elsewhere. Why can’t companies learn from the mistakes of others?
… a large format (A4 or 8.5″x11″) e-ink reader that has precisely the following features:
1. Looks like a USB mass storage device to my computer.
2. Can render PDF.
3. Rechargeable.
No wireless, no Amazon-only, etc. MP3 players meet similar requirements and are ubiquitious, one can only hope that e-ink readers catch on similarly …
Does anyone know what exactly the nature of the DRM is? My understanding, which may be wrong, is something like this:
1) You can only buy kindlebooks from your Amazon account. No other retailer sells them.
2) You can only read them on the kindle they are registered to.
3) This means you cannot either sell or lend them.
If this is wrong, it would be nice to hear, and then there is stuff I just don’t know but would like to:
4) Can you move kindlebooks onto your PC, and if so what can you then do with them? You cannot, is that right, read them on it?
5) Then we have non-Kindle open books. How do you transfer a Gutenberg or pdf book onto the Kindle? Is there a USB connection as with some of the other readers? Can you insert a memory card or stick and read what is on it? I recall reading that to get stuff onto it, you had to mail it to Amazon and have it converted to DRMd format and then get it mailed back. Is that true?
6) Finally there are competing DRM formats like the ones used by other vendors of ebooks. How many of these formats does Kindle read?
Where we want to get to surely is what you have with paper books today. Buy them from multiple retailers and read them in the same way, lend them, resell them. How much of this does either Kindle offer?
Apparently the answer to one of the questions can be obtained from the mobipocket experience. Amazon bought mobipocket, but you cannot read DRM’d mobipocket books on Kindles.
This tells us something quite important, if true.
The entire Amazon approach is a vendor lockin approach, if you really want to go for open formats use a reader which allows to read epub in drm and non drm versions…
You might loose some DRMed books (although the selection already is quite large) but you have a reader which supports a vendor neutral open standard!
It’s kind of true. Technically you can’t read a DRM’d mobipocket book on a kindle, but it’s a pretty trivial process to get them on there. I had around 20 of them that I read on my pda, and it just took a few minutes to find and use a utility to do the conversion on them all.
I will say it does leave me with some concern for the future though. I lucked out ‘this’ time, but who’s to say things will work out as well if the kindle gets surpassed by the next big thing.
Correct.
3) This means you cannot either sell or lend them.
[/q]
Sell, no. But you can link up accounts and transfer books between kindles. Though only one person can actually access the book at a time. Pretty much like lending.
You can move them onto a computer, but there’s really nothing to do with them there other than back them up.
You can do it the email way, but you can also just toss a txt file onto the kindle yourself. Other formats, like doc, do have to have the processing done by amazon. There’s the free service where they just email it back, and then you put it on the kindle yourself. For a small fee, I think a dime if I recall, they’ll make it avaiable for download directly onto the kindle.
Just mobi, as far as I know. And it’s not an official thing, just a hack that someone put together.
Depends on the person. Personally, I don’t care where the books come from. Part of what’s nice about the kindle is the integration with amazon. I like that I can actually browse for books on the kindle and buy them with one click.
You *CAN* buy books for the Kindle from places other than Amazon. Just not DRM locked books! And, of course, you can’t buy them from the Kindle store; but you can order them from another online store and have them delivered to your Kindle via the wireless network for the standard $0.10 charge, or you can download them and copy them over via usb for free.
http://www.webscription.net/
http://www.fictionwise.com/
Both sell perfectly fine eBooks that work with the Kindle.
From Webscriptions, everything works, I think. I’ve only bought there once, but it was 10 books for $20. They came as a .zip file full of .mobi files. I copied them over with a usb cable. Webscriptions also has a selection of free books.
From Fictionwise, you can only buy their “multi-format” titles, which are not DRM locked. Once you buy it, Fictionwise lets you re-download any of your purchased titles in any available format, anytime.
Both stores, if I recall, have a button that says “click here to send to your Kindle”. You have to pre-register their sender address with your Kindle account (spam prevention).
There are probably others too; those are the only two I’ve tried.
In a way, Amazon-only DRM might be a feature, not a bug. Other people who want to sell to Kindle owners can simply sell unlocked .mobi or .pdf files, thus (hopefully) encouraging vendors to stay away from DRM!
Years ago I used to read books from Project Gutenberg on my Pocket PC. The screen was small, but it had plenty of battery. The Kindle is interesting but I refuse to buy into any closed ecosystem. I suspect the reason the Kindle DX doesn’t have a SD slot is to make it harder to load non-Amazon content. I will wait for the Chinese to do what they do best, copy and refine someone else’s product. Kindle knock-offs can’t be that far away. They will not be locked to Amazon.
Edit: Comment deleted. Added reply to wrong thread
Edited 2009-05-08 13:43 UTC
Want. A fantastic solution to a real world problem – WTF do I do with all these goddamned books??? Being able to carry all of my networking and sysadmin books on a device that appears to be about the size of a clip board = a no brainer. Anyone who says otherwise has obviously never had the pleasure of toting around Routing TCP/IP vols I and II along with a few odd BGP and MPLS tomes.
$500 is too rich for my blood, though.
I had played with an original Kindle and decided that I didn’t need a beta-quality device. I preordered a Kindle 2 the day they were announced, and I preordered a Kindle DX yesterday.
Let me see if I can clear up some misconceptions about the Kindle.
DRM: You can only buy DRM locked books from Amazon (there’s a hack for other DRM’ed books but I’ve never bothered trying it.). However, you can ALSO buy or download NON-DRM books from anywhere: Gutenberg, Fictionwise, Webscriptions are a few that I’ve tried. The catch is that Kindle 2 wants everything in .mobi format… but to reiterate, NON-DRM .mobi files work just fine and are not locked to the device or to Amazon!
Files can be copied to the Kindle 2 using a plain old ordinary USB cable (which is also how it’s recharged). You can also email files to an email address Amazon assigns to your Kindle, and Amazon then charges you a flat $0.10 for the wireless file transfer.
The pain in the neck bit is converting things into .mobi format. Amazon offers free conversion via an email service (with optional $0.10 delivery directly to your Kindle) which allegedly converts html, pdf, and txt… but I’ve had fairly bad luck with it. There’s also a free Windows .mobi creator/converter that works pretty well, but, well, only works on Windows! And even when the conversion DOES work, it seems that you always lose a certain amount of formatting.
For reading novels or other plain-text books, the Kindle 2 is really quite wonderful. The battery lasts practically forever, so I can read all day without thinking about whether or not it needs to be charged. And the screen really is VERY much easier on the eyes than an LCD screen. You’ll really have to use one for a day to understand the difference. And buying a new book from Amazon is really just too easy. You can search the Amazon Kindle store, find a book, download a sample, and then buy the whole book if you want it, all with a couple button clicks… and because it has the wireless service built-in, it works practically everywhere.
There’s also an experimental web browser, which, at least at the moment, is free, and can be pointed at arbitrary websites. It’s just not fast enough for random surfing, and the formatting is sometimes kind of iffy… it definitely deserves to be called experimental! But I’ve used it successfully with long Wikipedia pages, and it works quite well for that. As near as I can tell, though, you can’t save pages for later review or anything like that.
The thing the Kindle 2 isn’t very good at is technical stuff. Code listings in computer books get broken in strange places, making things difficult to read. This can be reduced, to some degree, by setting the font size really, really small… but this makes things harder to read, especially if you happen to be middle aged…
The Kindle DX stands a good chance of being wonderful. Copy PDF files to it over USB… and read them. Or email them to the Kindle for a dime. (The usefulness of this shouldn’t be underestimated, because usually I’m at work and my Kindle is at home. And at work, we’ve already started talking about getting Kindles for the programming team. Email a pdf file to one of our internal mailing lists, and have it pushed out to all the team members automatically? An interesting possibility.)
Is it expensive. Duh! Of course it’s expensive! For me, the benefits make it worthwhile, because I read a LOT of pdf files, and being able to read them more comfortably is a big win for me. If you can’t handle the sticker shock, just wait a couple of years. I’ll pay extra to get started now.
“But I can just read them on a netbook and it’s cheaper?” No, sorry, no comparison… I *have* a netbook, and it’s an apples-and-oranges comparison. If I’m going to spend several hours reading, the netbook is heavier, more cumbersome, and has an inferior screen. Yes, it’s cheaper… but I’m paying for the comfort and convenience.
“It needs an SD card slot!” Well, I think so too. Sadly, the current book-management software in the Kindle isn’t great, and I don’t think I’d want to try to manage thousands of books on my Kindle. The built-in storage (2gig for Kindle 2, 4gig for Kindle DX) is probably sufficient for now. The Kindle 3 really needs better software… and an SD card slot!
I haven’t tried any of the magazine or newspaper subscriptions Amazon offers, but have been considering it. I just have too much other stuff to read. Also, some of the stuff I want to subscribe to isn’t available on the Kindle. Yet.
And a word on Amazon book prices: to be blunt, many of them are too freaking expensive! But that’s not really a problem for me, as I’ve only bought a few books from Amazon, and don’t expect to buy a lot. I just don’t like buying DRM locked stuff. Ever.
So, to sum up, I have high hopes for the Kindle DX. Assuming the native PDF renderer works well, I think I’ll be very happy with it.
For those of you who hate the Kindle: um, you might want to try one for a while. It’s not perfect; I think we’re still in the early stages of the true e-book era. But it’s quite a lot better than some of you seem to think it is!
Thanks for taking the trouble to write at such length. Informative and interesting.
My only question is if this Kindle still makes you email your pdf’s to yourself and run them through an antipiracy utility like the first one did.