THE KINDLE DX MAKES READING EASY AND MORE FUN THAN EVER

It is a little heavier than I had hoped and the slide switch, located at the top of the device, is a little cheesy as is the tiny keyboard. Both could be slightly larger. The button for turning the page is conveniently located on the right side, or left for you South Paws, if you just turn your Kindle upside down (remember the text follows you). The other controls are also strategically located making for a user friendly product.

I don’t for one minute regret buying this device. Granted it is a little on the expensive side, but you are saving all kinds of $$$ by ordering the books electronically at prices that are drastically reduced. The most glaring deficiency is the fact that it is does not provide color graphics. When paying almost $500 this should be standard. It is because of this, and this alone, that I give the Kindle DX four instead of five stars.

In conclusion, if you are a serious reader like me and would love to dump those old glasses, the Kindle DX is made just for you! It is convenient, fun, and very easy to use. I doubt the price will go down anytime soon so I recommend you take the plunge and buy the new Kindle. You will be reading like you’ve never read before!

Only OK for academic researchers w/ lots of PDFs

I am a professor who was hoping to use the kindle DX to store, organize, and display the hundreds of pdfs that I have containing research articles, books, book chapters, and scanned notes. I was hoping the DX was an opportunity to ditch most of my paper. However, it has a few shortcomings that will prevent me from being truly paperless:

1) The Kindle lacks the ability to organize content: Every document on the kindle is displayed in a single giant list. I’ve moved about 100 pdf documents over to the kindle, and I have another hundred to go. The document list is already cluttered, and, as a result, it is difficult to find the documents I need. [PLEASE Amazon, at least send a firmware update that will allow the Kindle DX to recognize and use file folders. That way, I can put related articles together in a folder and keep things nice and organized.]

2) The Kindle system is not conducive to reference works: Want to quickly skim around to part of an article or book? You can’t. You can use the menu system to jump to a certain page, but the page numbers refer to the pages of the pdf, not the document pages, so it is difficult to know what page number to jump to. As a result, finding that certain graph or picture or table buried within a book or long article is difficult. Ideally, the kindle would have a method of skipping several pages at a time, or displaying thumbnails (6 pages on screen) so that a reader could skip to the desired page with greater ease.

3) It takes some prep to ensure your pdfs are fully usable with the kindle: If you have adobe acrobat (the full version), save yourself some headaches and prepare each pdf by a) using the OCR function so that text is identified, b) making sure pages are all in the correct orientation or kindle’s default rotation setting will prevent you from turning the page sideways to view a landscape table or graph (but you can turn off auto-rotation in the menu) and c) trimming excess margins by cropping the document.

This fall, I’m scanning in my lecture notes and will attempt to use the kindle when I teach. It will be an interesting experiment.

Overall, the Kindle DX is definitely better suited to readers with a limited selection of pre-formatted books that have been optimized for the kindle (i.e. the books amazon sells). If you are someone like me, looking to use the kindle as a way to carry around your entire academic library, be forewarned–it works, just not all that well.

Amazon Kindle DX Leather Cover Review

By Erika Ayala 

Kindle DX : More than the 6″ Kindle’s Big Brother

I was one of the first people to buy the original Kindle. I was also among the first to buy the 2nd generation Kindle. And yes, I am among the first to buy the Kindle DX. Obviously, I really love the product!

The Kindle DX is the most expensive in the Kindle family. It is also much larger than the original. The screen size of the DX is the same size as the entire small Kindle and its leather case. That’s the reason it is worth the substantial price tag.

Consider. How would you like to read the “Wall Street Journal” in a paperback book format? I tried by subscribing on the original Kindle. It wasn’t a satisfying experience. Yes, I got to read the Journal, which I love, but what a pain moving from article to article or trying to get the sense of reading a newspaper. The “New York Times” was worse. A newspaper is created to be read in a multi-column format.

The Kindle DX has a feature that makes reading a newspaper feel like…reading a newspaper. If you turn the DX on its side, the display goes from a portrait view to landscape. You can see multiple columns in a newsapaper! You can see (albeit in black-and-white) the picture on the front page.

If you use your Kindle for book reading, you can enlarge the type and not have to click the “next” button every few seconds. If you are a student, the Kindle DX page is the same size as most text books. You can read and study with ease. You can also highlight important sections.

On the minus side, the Kindle DX costs a lot and is larger and heavier than the original. Personally, I don’t mind the extra size and weight. It is still wafer thin and lighter than most hard cover books. If you care, it has increased memory so you can keep up to 3,500 books available. I think I woudl be bankrupt long before I could fill up that much memory. If you use the DX for school or work, the ability to search the entire collection of books and documents in the DX is amazing.

There is one other feature of the Kindle DX that could turn out to be super-helpful: the ability to import and read PDF files. For example, the service manual of my car is several thousand pages long. I have it in PDF form. I can upload it to my Kindle DX (the DX is the only Kindle that can read PDF files) and search for the information I want about my car. That’s cool.

If you are considering your first Kindle and can afford the extra cost, the DX is absolutely the best electronic book reader ever made. For a couple of hundred less, you can get the 2nd generation Kindle which does a great job with books. If you plan to use your Kindle for text books, journals, magazines, or newspapers; the Kindle DX will make you much happier.

After more than two years of Kindle DX ownership, I give this wonderful family of devices five stars!

By Bob Walter

First Review Kindle DX

This is the fist time I have reviewed a product. Though I enjoy reading other people’s reviews, I never felt strongly enough to write my own review. But having my Kindle DX for a little over a week has changed that.

My primary reason for buying the Kindle DX was work. I work in the computer field and need to read a lot of documentation. Often I will print out the documentation so I can use it for reference. This leads to lots of manuals that eventually get outdated and need to be recycled. On the kindle DX I can copy over the documentation, which is in pdf format, and carry all the information I need with me. In fact, I recently had a meeting with a client where I needed to verify the syntax for a SQL statement. I pulled out my kindle and was able to show exactly what the documentation said.

But I am also enjoying the kindle as a repository for personal reading material. I have purchased a number of books from Amazon, of course, but there is a ton of free material on the web. If I didn’t want to purchase any current work, I could spend my days reading Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Twain, …

I recommend the Kindle DX for anyone who like me reads a lot of pdfs or wants to enjoys having immediate access to books. It is a powerful tool and I am enjoying it immensely.

Another thing I wanted to add is that I can access email with my Kindle and check websites. All without having to pay extra. I certainly understand those who cannot afford the Kindle DX or want more features, but for now this is the best that is out there. If you need access to a large # of pdfs and books, this is the device. I don’t think it is heavy, but I didn’t buy the smaller K1 or K2. I choose not to buy them because they were too small.

For all the negative comments I have read, I haven’t heard alot about alternatives. So far, everyone I know who has seen it loves it. I feel fortunate to have it and would recommend you buy one if you can afford it.

6/24 Update

This may never happen to anyone else, but I accidentally tried to buy the same book twice. I need to start taking my memory pills again (I just can’t remember where I put them). Anyway, the Kindle DX nicely told me that I had already downloaded the book and there was no need for me to purchase it again.

By MVG

Amazon to open Kindle DX textbook store

This has not yet been announced by Amazon, but a KindleBoards member who happens to be a college professor learned that Amazon plans to open a Kindle DX textbook store, on or about July 1st.

She wrote to the publishers listed in Amazon’s May 6th press release, and one of those publishers leaked the news to her. No word yet on which textbooks will be offered, or at what prices.

Kindle DX is available now for order and starts shipping this week. The DX is targeted to college students, business people, and others who can benefit from its larger 9.7-inch screen, auto-rotating display, PDF support, and 4GB storage capacity.

Shipping emails for the Kindle DX were sent from Amazon this week, to the intense interest of all who ordered the latest Kindle reader - including me.

I chose SuperSaver shipping, and my projected arrival date is June 22 to June 26. Others who arranged for overnight shipping are seeing arrival dates as early as June 11.

I’m hoping that Amazon delights us again with their shipping. My Kindle 2 came in a full week earlier than its projected arrival date. I would love to see my Kindle DX a little earlier!

If you haven’t witnessed the Kindle DX in use, play the above video from mobileread - it shows an extended demo of the Kindle DX from the Amazon press announcement of a few weeks ago.

The Kindle DX can be ordered through Amazon and is being shipped next week on a first-come, first-served basis.

Kindle DX Announced- Who Is It For Again?

Far less than actual size

Amazon had the big Kindle DX press event today and I’ve been combing the massive amount of information that’s come available to try and figure this thing out. Not much was revealed today that hadn’t already been divulged, and after diving into this tower of news I must admit I’m trying to figure out who, exactly, the Kindle DX is targeting.

The hardware of the Kindle DX is what we expected; it’s basically a larger Kindle 2, which is surprising to me. I can’t for the life of me understand why Amazon has timed the Kindle DX announcement to be so soon after the launch of the Kindle 2. There is very little that is different between the two devices, frankly, other than size. Sure the Kindle DX will auto-rotate into landscape orientation, but that’s something many devices will do and I don’t believe that adds very much in the usability department, given the type of content that Amazon is touting for the DX. Newspapers, periodicals and textbooks are all formatted for pages that are longer than they are wide, so the landscape trick is not very useful, in my view. Several folks at the press event claimed that rotation is slow enough to be aggravating, which just makes this worse.

The pricing of the Kindle DX may be its downfall. Amazon will retail the device for $489 and have opened up for pre-orders. That price is very high for a gadget of limited use and I think we’ll see it drop sooner rather than later if Amazon wants to sell many of these. They did touch on subsidies from newspapers to drive the price down but at a cost of a vague long-term contract subscription to obtain them. Consumers don’t like contracts for subsidies as a rule, and I can’t imagine that many will want to sign one for a newspaper or periodical of some sort. Thrown in on top of that is the admission by The Washington Post and The New York Times that a subsidy is only available to those who don’t live in areas that have home delivery of the print edition available. That eliminates a big sector of the target market for the Kindle DX so I’m really confused how this will work. Will they simply ban anyone in NYC from getting a subsidy, even those who do not already subscribe to the NYT? Aren’t lack of subscribers at the heart of their financial woes? You see why I am confused how this will help them out. What happens if you cancel the contract mid-term? Does your credit card then get a big hit for the subsidy loss leaving you with a really expensive device you don’t use?

Amazon is also pushing the new Kindle DX to students for electronic textbook usage. This makes sense on the surface but the more I delve into this usage the more unsure I get if this is really a good thing. The ability to carry many textbooks around in the Kindle DX is definitely much better than carrying all those heavy, paper textbooks around, but will students really carry one around everywhere? The key to making this a viable market will be cheaper textbooks, and I mean much cheaper. Remember that these will be DRM-infested textbooks, in effect licensed to the student who pays the big bucks. That means that there will be no loaning of the book to fellow students and no reselling the “used” textbook at the end of the term. If we look at how much cheaper regular e-books are than paper books we know that the lack of paper doesn’t make the price go down. I can’t see these electronic textbooks being much cheaper than the paper variety, either.

It’s important to realize that electronic textbooks are nothing new. CourseSmart has been selling them for a while and students who go that route can read them on the laptop they already own. No extra expensive device needed for those who want to go with textbooks in e-book format. This is really nothing new.

I don’t intend to be wholly negative about the Kindle DX; I am a huge supporter of e-books in every form and I love electronic readers. I enjoy using my Kindle 1 and if I didn’t own one I’d probably buy a Kindle 2. I wouldn’t for the life of me buy a Kindle DX, though, because it’s too expensive and too darn big. Several hands-on accounts of the Kindle DX I’ve read today indicate that it’s heavy and bulky and not very comfortable to use. That makes it a much worse deal for me personally than the Kindle 2. Sure the Kindle 2 is smaller, but the text is just as big. So you hit the “Next Page” button more often than on the bigger DX. Who cares?