Amazon Kindle DX Details Revealed

theodp writes with news that details for the Kindle DX are now available. "Specs-wise, the big changes are a larger 9.7-inch screen that rotates to landscape display, a PDF reader, and more storage space. The Kindle DX carries a $489 price tag (compared to the $359 Kindle 2)." Engadget has a series of pictures from Jeff Bezos' presentation, and the Amazon product information page has further details and a video. According to the press release, Amazon has worked out a deal with The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and The Washington Post to "offer the Kindle DX at a reduced price to readers who live in areas where home-delivery is not available."

Comments

Too expensive

[InsaneProcessor]

I will not pay that price as long as books are cheap and PDFs can be read on my computer.

Re:Too expensive

[langelgjm]

As someone who has to read a lot of PDFs, I've gotten sick of reading them on the computer. If they're more than about 5 pages long, it's really irritating. Printing them out wastes paper, and takes a long time when they can be dozens or even hundreds of pages long.

The whole point of an e-book reader is the e-ink display. When I first saw one, it was amazing how much easier to read it is than a computer screen.

I pre-ordered a Kindle DX today. I'd been looking at the iRex DR-1000, but it was even more expensive, and has very mixed reviews. I anticipate using the DX on a daily basis probably for the next several years (grad student)... and I won't have to be tied to a computer, or drag around a laptop. Battery life is supposed to better even than netbooks.

Re:Too expensive

[Just Some Guy]

As someone who has to read a lot of PDFs, I've gotten sick of reading them on the computer.

I'm sick of reading them, period. I hate PDFs, with their author-chosen fonts, non-adjustable margins, and unconfigurable page breaks. I'd much rather read something in HTML or the equivalent so that changing the font to my liking reflows the text, and I don't have to toggle between "zoomed in enough to read without a microscope" and "zoomed out enough that I'm not constantly scrolling left-to-right.

Please, kill PDFs for machine reading. They're fine for print but absolutely suck on dynamic displays.

Re:Too expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

i bought and returned the kindle 2. Was planning on using for PDFs also, but for reference works (science, computing). Discovered PDF formatting is pretty useless for anything but very basic text and front to back reading. I bought a couple computer books from amazon, but were basically useless. Source code listings within text don't wrap properly. No hotlinking between TOC, index, text and figures.

Re:Too expensive

[Ihmhi]

Why hasn't anyone manufactured just an e-ink display?

No need to worry about all the internal components. Have the display, a stand (that can rotate from portrait to landscape), and a carrying case. Use your existing stuff to read with it, such as a laptop or desktop.

It'd probably be way cheaper than a second monitor and those of us who read looong PDFs would make use of somethin' like this.

Re:Too expensive

[slapout]

"and PDFs can be read on my computer."

Checked out the price of a computer lately?

Good Next Step

[Sponge Bath]

Good: Size and ability to download your own PDFs via USB. Price is not that outrageous for an early adopter type product.

Needs Improvement: Add SD card reader and WiFi. Switch between WiFi and 3G like the iPhone does so you can use a faster WiFi connection when available.

Bad: Disables table of contents feature for PDFs. Dumb

Re:Good Next Step

[Hadlock]

Really bad: Costs $500
 
Supposedly a subscription to the NYT or other major paper will get you a price cut, but $500 is $150 too much for a larger version of the Kindle 2, which only costs $190 to build. The rebate ought to be $200 or more otherwise there's no savings over the print version (with the 6" kindle there's a savings of about $130 at current subscription rates). The fact that they're only offering the (so far not officially announced) discount in areas that don't already offer delivery of the NYT in print form is more depressing.
 
I had my fingers crossed for this, but damnit Amazon, offer this at a price I'm willing to pay. The 6" model is just too damn small for serious reading.

Re:Good Next Step

[fm6]

Because every little bit of hardware you add to a device raises the price. Consumer devices are sold on paper-thin margins, so you aim on the likely use case. You don't add features, however cheap, that most of your users will never need.

The exception to this is legacy features, like those infrared ports you see on so many laptops. But this is a totally new application — there's no history to impose legacy features.

All such book reads will fail until...

[Nutria]

they are cheap enough that people won't worry about ruining them at the beach or by dropping them onto the floor.

Re:All such book reads will fail until...

[CastrTroy]

Really. It doesn't stop people from buying $500 smartphones and $300 MP3 players. Just be careful with your stuff. Sure it's not suited for all environments, like at the beach, there are quite a few good things about such a device. So it doesn't work at the beach. I only go to the beach once a year, and spend 48 weeks out of the year (minimum) in the city.

Re:All such book reads will fail until...

[Kozar_The_Malignant]

It's more business/academic oriented

But that just narrows the market size by 90%, which doesn't seem very bright.

Targeting smart people with money doesn't seem a bad business model.

Re:All such book reads will fail until...

[langelgjm]

If I am already carrying around a laptop, why would I want to carry another piece of equipment that performs a subset of functions that a laptop can do?

That's what everyone is missing. An e-book reader does not perform a subset of the features of a laptop - it performs a different task, one that a laptop is not as well-suited for, namely, reading long documents. I would MUCH rather read a 50 page journal article on the large Kindle than on my laptop.

I don't see much value from this device to students. Most textbooks are not available in electronic form, so it's not like students can carry one device instead of several heavy books. Also, from my experience I can tell that students generally don't have any time for casual reading,

I don't care about the textbooks so much as the ability to read PDFs. Both my undergraduate and master's degrees involved reading LOTS of PDFs - journal articles, scanned chapters of books, working papers, etc. That's why it could be useful for students, not for the casual reading part.

Re:All such book reads will fail until...

[rednip]

But that just demonstrates the stupidity and lemming-like nature of hip, cool, trendy people.

It's true that some people use items to improve social status, others attempt it by making snarky comments.

Re:Great, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Apparently the colour E-Ink they've seen demoed isn't up to par yet. It's coming though, I'm sure.

Regardless, Amazon is going to make an absolute killing with these things.

Significant advantages to students:

[aussersterne]

1. Searchable (wooohoo!)
2. Carry one thin device, not 20lbs of books

Those alone might have caused me to buy it as an undergrad.

Re:The point isn't newspapers or magazines.

[CRCulver]

Resale is never going to be allowed. The only reason textbook publishers would sign on to digital technologies is if it would kill the resale market.

as long as books are cheap

[wiredog]

Checked out the price of college textbooks lately?

Re:as long as books are cheap

[0100010001010011]

Selling my engineering books is my biggest regret. I swore up and down I'd never need Thermodynamics. I'm a controls engineer...

Low and behold I'm controlling a thermodynamic system.

Wiki and other such sites are wonderful, but they're not presented in the medium that I learned them in with the coefficients and with the equations as I learned them.

Engineers, hold on to your text books. I know that $20 for beer looks good now but you'll want that book later much more than you want the beer now.

Re:as long as books are cheap

[Just Some Guy]

yes, buying them for both of my sons. Buy used, the resell when done. Net result is low cost.

Yeah. When I bought that used sociology text (to fulfill the gen-ed requirements for my Comp Sci major), angels parted the clouds and played trumpets as a flock of serving virgins carried it out in a velvet-lined platinum ark.

When selling it 4 months later (in mint condition because I never actually opened it), the bookstore did me the favor of accepting it without charging me disposal fees.

But keep the books from your major. You'll like having them down the road.

Re:as long as books are cheap

[masmullin]

youve got a job now... go re-buy them cheapo!

I would love it as

[Shivetya]

a text book replacement.

Of course colleges would be loathe to give up the money they make selling new books to students each year...

but...

it would make the lives of students easier... done right a kiosk could let you download all the stuff you need for each class.

give me an oil and shock resistant one this size and it means the mechanic has a reference at his fingertips...

there are so many possibilities and so many with their existing revenue streams endangered...

Re:I would love it as

[MarcoAtWork]

why would they give up the money? they'd still charge you for the textbooks AND you won't be able to lend them (you can't lend just one of your books, you'd have to lend them all, and that usually doesn't work) AND you won't be able to resell them at the end of the semester.

I think the schoolbook publishing industry will jump in with both feet here, basically completely cutting out the used market and any sort of sharing of books, 1 student = 1 book every semester, it will make them a ton of money; roll it in in the college tuition and it will work even better for them in terms of guaranteed income.

As a mathematician ...

[IntelliTubbie]

... I *really* hope that this is finally the device I've been holding out for. I have hundreds of papers in PDF format, most produced using LaTeX, downloaded from the arXiv or elsewhere -- but because it's too much of a pain to read on-screen, I end up printing out several papers a week (dozens or hundreds of pages) just to read and then throw away. Stacks of printouts are gathering chalk dust on my desk, because I need to refer to them frequently, and don't want to print out a fresh copy every time I want to do that. People who complain that this device doesn't have a full-color touchscreen with video capabilities are missing the point: this is meant to replace your printer, not your computer.

Also, while I'm not a fan of DRM, it still beats the heck out of the "edition wars" in textbook publishing. Because used book sales hurt the market for new books, publishers charge an extortionate amount of money for new textbooks and constantly release new editions (sometimes with trivial changes, like rearranged exercises) to depreciate the value of used books. All else being equal, I'd rather see $40 electronic textbooks that can't be sold back, rather than $200 hardcover monstrosities that get "revised" every other year. (Of course, while this may be the lesser evil, it's still an evil -- I'd much rather assign a book that's freely available, or available in a cheap Dover paperback edition, than do either of these -- so don't flame me, please!)

Cheers,
IT

Re:As a mathematician ...

[maynard]

If the Kindle viewer could display LaTeX, you'd have a point. But entering in plain text Tex as annotation, without any rendering back in real math symbols, is not what I call user friendly.

Re:Hierarchical purchasing and the netbook threat

[infosinger]

Except for one thing--- E-ink. This display technology sets these devices apart from any computer or netbook. The problem is that E-ink is a very poor choice for a general purpose computer--its refresh rate is way too slow. So, unless Apple wants to license E-ink and come up with a book reading device, I kind of doubt they are going to bracket Amazon. I have a very high quality display at home and I will take the Kindle any time for book reading.

Re:PDFs Are A Problem, Not A Solution

[Cochonou]

But being printed on standard paper is the actual fate of the immense majority of documents. Standard size PDF documents are what people want to be able to read on their ereaders, in order to replace printouts. I believe most couldn't care less about the reflowing advantages or customizable typefaces brought by ereaders.

Re:Hierarchical purchasing and the netbook threat

[MartinSchou]

You seem to be under the impression that ebook-readers are all a subset of netbooks. They're not.

The thing that attracts people to ebook-readers is that you can read them just about anywhere. Find me a reasonably priced lcd/oled screen that you can read outside with the sun beating down on it.

Second is portability. An ebook-reader the size of a paper back is fine. A portable computer that size isn't really unless we're talking cellphone or pda. Netbooks indicates a keyboard, and I'm yet to find a keyboard in the netbook range that I am able to touch type on - my fingers are quite simply too big (comes with being 194 cm/6'4"). And if I'm getting something with a useless keyboard, why even bother with the keyboard?

Now, if my netbook is stolen somewhere, I now have to worry about my banking information, budget, private information etc being in someone elses hands. If my ebook-reader is stolen, I now have to download the books to a different reader.

Also, if you add in a touch screen interface like in the iRex DR 1000S you get an easy way to annotate the books/documents you're reading. While it's entirely possible to get that into a netbook, I'm yet to see anyone market a netbook tablet.

Will the two converge at one point? Perhaps. But for now I would rather have a good ebook-reader than a great netbook.

Please let the auto-rotate feature be configurable

[sekra]

I don't want the reader to rotate into landscape mode when lying down in bed on the side to read.

ixnay on the eyboardkay

[Eil]

I'll buy one when they don't come with a useless space-occupying damn physical keyboard.