Amazon Launches Kindle DX

Amazon introduced the third edition of its Kindle this morning, a version that, in addition to offering trade books, will now display textbooks, computer books and cookbooks on a 9.7 inch electronic display screen that includes 16 shades of grade—the same gray-scale as the Kindle 2. Magazines and newspapers, already available on the Kindle, will increase their presence on the new device. Price for Kindle DX is $489 and Amazon will start shipping the device in the summer.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos was present at the press conference at Pace University in lower Manhattan to unveil the Kindle DX, which is essentially a larger, enhanced version of the Kindle 2. Bezos quicky reviewed the commercial history of the Kindle beginning with the growth in titles available—90,000 titles in 2007 up to 275,000 today. “We have what people want to read,” he said noting as well the low battery consumption, nonbacklit e-ink screen, no computer needed and most importantly, 24-7 wireless connectivity on a cell phone network—“no need to run looking for hot spots,” said.

Amazon hopes the larger screen and improved display will entice students to use Kindle DX and Cengage, Pearson, and John Wiley have agreed to make textbooks available through Kindle DX. Arizona State, Case Western Reserve, Princeton, Reed College, Pace—unannounced at the press conference—and Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia will launch trial programs this fall in which they will distribute Kindle DX to students across a range of subjects. “We look forward to seeing how the device affects the participation of both students and faculty in the educational experience,” said Barbara Snyder, president of Case Western.

The controversial text to speech function will be enabled on the Kindle DX. According to Laura Porco, director of Kindle books, the university pilot program will have “hundreds to thousands” of students and include “hundreds to thousands” of textbooks. Textbook prices, she said, will be unchanged. Geoffrey Brackett, provost for academic affairs at Pace, said Pace would have about 50 students in “discreet sections of coursework” included in the pilot. And while he suggested that Pace would likely subsidize the price of the devices to some extent, he said students would likely pay for the textbooks. But he emphasized that the details of the pilot arrangement were still being negotiated. “We think this will be highly useful and efficient for students,” he said.

To induce newspaper readers to use Kindle DX, Amazon is teaming with The New York Times (Times publisher A. O. Sulzberger Jr. was at the press conference), the Boston Globe and Washington Post in a program that will let would-be subscribers who live in areas where there is no home delivery to buy the Kindle DX at a reduced price if they agree to subscribe to a long-term subscription to the paper via the Kindle DX.

By Jim Milliot and Calvin Reid

Group Sues to Stop Kindle DX Deployment at ASU

Amazon Kindle News) The National Federation of the Blind (NFB) and the American Council of the Blind (ACB) has filed a lawsuit against Arizona State University to stop the University from purchasing the Amazon Kindle DX to replace textbooks in the classroom. Both the NFB and ACB say that the Amazon Kindle DX cannot be used by blind students. The main contentions in the lawsuit is that while the Kindle DX has a text-to-speech feature, the menus to select a book or purchase a book are not blind-friendly, making it impossible to select textbooks for download.

Six educational institutions, including ASU, are deploying the Kindle DX as part of a pilot project to assess the role of electronic textbooks in the classroom. The NFB and ACB have also filed complaints with the Office for Civil Rights of the U.S. Department of Education and the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, asking for investigations of these five institutions, which are: Case Western Reserve University, the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia, Pace University, Princeton University, and Reed College. The lawsuit and complaints allege violations of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and the Rehabilitation Act of 1973.

“Given the highly-advanced technology involved, there is no good reason that Amazon’s Kindle DX device should be inaccessible to blind students,” says Dr. Marc Maurer, President of the National Federation of the Blind. “Amazon could have used the same text-to-speech technology that reads e-books on the device aloud to make its menus accessible to the blind, but it chose not to do so. Worse yet, six American higher education institutions that are subject to federal laws requiring that they not discriminate against students with disabilities plan to deploy this device, even though they know that it cannot be used by blind students. The National Federation of the Blind will not tolerate this unconscionable discrimination against and callous indifference to the right of blind students to receive an equal education. We hope that this situation can be rectified in a manner that allows this exciting new reading technology to be made available to blind and sighted students alike.”

By Joe Tracy

Why You Should Get a Kindle DX

Kindle DX : Satisfied but looking forward to software improvements

In my initial review of the Kindle DX I rated it 3 stars, but am revising that upward to 4 stars as I have used it more. This is primarily due to the excellent readability of the screen and the sheer utility of the device. I had not bought a Kindle previously because of lack of true PDF support and returned a Sony Reader because of very poor PDF support. One of my key reasons for wanting the Kindle DX was the promised PDF support. My impressions so far: 
1. The software puts Kindle format reading ahead of PDF, MP3, and browser support. I am fine with that to start, but hope Amazon will put the resources behind software updates to improve the Kindle DX for these other data types. 
2. The PDF support is servicable, but has room for improvement. For PDF articles it does a great job. For PDF books downloaded from the web (Google books or Internet Archive), will occasionally get “Some elements on this page could not be displayed” messages. These pages take extra long time to render. Hopefully, Amazon will identify the sources of these “elements” and improve the PDF rendering. As stated in other reviews, the Kindle DX does not support PDF index and other features, which is not ideal for book-length PDFs. Also, in general loading and turning pages in PDF is somewhat slower than the book formats. 
3. PDF cropping of white space is inconsistent. On clean PDF articles, it works great. On scanned books from the web in general will not work (I assume it is interpreting the noise lines near the edge as a real feature). A zoom would be helpful here with no loss of content. 
4. It is nice and convenient to have audio capability built in, eliminating the need to carry a separate audio player. However, the experimental version included is so rudimentary it is barely usable. The MP3’s sound nice (thru headphones, marginal thru speakers). There are play, stop, and forward buttons, but they forgot the back button. One needs to let the last song play out before it will loop back to the beginning. Add to this you cannot view what MP3’s are on the machine (except by using your computer in USB mode) nor set the play order. Hopefully Amazon will create some kind of audio player to create at least basic functionality. 
5. Keyboard buttons could have been a little bigger and more spread out in the same space on the bottom of the Kindle DX. That would have helped a lot. Typing into webpages is somewhat painful. I consider this a lesser sin for this generation of book reader, but would like to see something better in future generations. 
6. Some kind of foldering system would be nice. At this point I have loaded ~100 files, which take 7 pages on the home screen to go thru. Again, I hope Amazon puts the resources behind improving the software. 
In the future, I can imagine a Kindle size device that is a great book reader that you can read in bed, on an airplane, or just generally traveling about. It will have an audio player. It will be in color, providing full support to color books and PDF. It will also likely include a web browser (though how web access is paid for is separate issue). Nothing like this exists on the market today (net books and tablets just are not there yet either). Hopefully someone will see this as a vision for a product that will displace all current book readers. 
The Kindle DX is a step in that direction, and has some really nice characteristics-excellent screen rendering, very long battery life (4 days and still have half the initial charge), and portability. These are the reasons that justify to me purchasing the Kindle DX over a netbook or tablet for reading books and PDFs. I think the vision above is a few years away, and the Kindle DX can provide a lot of value now, so I am overall happy with my purchase. I hope Amazon will make me even happier over time by software improvements. 

BY Thomas Block

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?