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

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

Before the FUD creeps in again:

[aussersterne]

1. Yes, you can read non-DRM eBooks on Kindle in several formats, includint text and PDF
2. No, your Kindle does not die if you close your Amazon account
3. No, Amazon does not remotely kill your Kindle if this happens
4. And all of your books (including DRM) remain readable if this happens
5. And Kindle DOES have a USB port so you CAN copy files to and from it
6. And this USB port DOES work just like a flash drive so it's not Windows-only

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.

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

[milimetric]

Textbooks are expensive only in small part due to the hardcover / high quality paper they're printed on. The IP of the authors is what costs the most money.

Most likely the Kindle + e-versions of textbooks will be only slightly cheaper than paper textbooks. To really see the savings of the kindle you have to look deeper. Pens, paper, notebooks used to write notes on will be in some large part replaced by the annotation capabilities of the Kindle. Mobile internet for life is also something that people seem to underestimate. Furthermore, reducing paper waste seems to me by far the biggest cost reduction. It's just not one that we typically factor in when we're sliding our credit card.

Here's to a better world and better Kindles to come.

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: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.

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.

If you are that paranoid,

[aussersterne]

there is a switch that you can use to turn wireless off. And it's clear that it actually does so, as turning the switch of extends battery life by a massive margin.

No wireless, no connection to Amazon.

You can still get your books, even the DRM ones, just buy them on Amazon, download them, and copy them over with USB.

We pay almost $500 for the ability to read ebooks using this device's user interface. If another make duplicates it or someone comes up with an open platform that does exactly the same things in the same way with a similar industrial design, I'll be happy to buy it.

If you don't need ebooks read on e-ink using the Kindle's interface, I don't know why you'd pay $500 for such a Linux platform.

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: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.

Thermodynamics textbooks?

[tomhudson]

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.

We burn heretics around here. That's the 4th law of thermdynamics.

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.

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.