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?
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This edition of Kindle should be very popular among graduate students. For example, it has all the features I need personally – large screen, native PDF support, annotating – and which other readers either lack or have them in a not very usable format. I just hope that I will not have to use Amazon service to transfer my readings on Kindle DX. Otherwise, it does look great. I would buy it right away.
Native PDF support with out going through an Amazon conversion is a plus! I have so many PDFs that I need to reference for my job.
they rushed it too release because the new iPad going to be announced by Apple next has already teamed up with several hundred magazines & newspapers for subscription based services.
it’s too late for amazon though, its an inferior device with inferior partners…
I own a Sony Reader that I have many books on, and I really wanted to be excited by the DX since it seemed different enough to potentially justify me jumping to Amazon and owning both formats… however the price is just a little bit too high that I find I cannot bring myself to pre-order it.
For the sake of $50 I probably would have. Perhaps with subsidies I will revisit the idea.
I’ll give Apple till this comes out and then will buy it if there isn’t better I’ll buy it. I have a lot of pdf’s (I buy them from manning for tech docs) and my Sony reader does a really bad job at displaying them (first gen Sony).
The larger screen is a win and it will be interesting to see what a manga looks on that size display.
3gig of storage is sad since it would be nice to take my whole library with me when traveling.
As a couple of folks mentioned before, a thing you missed was native PDF support. This is actually, a pretty big deal. From personal experience, conversion (or rather, reflowing) from PDF to Kindle/Kindle 2 format was between mediocre and atrocious. Mostly due to the nature of the format (absolute positioning and whatnot), but still.
Interestingly enough, if the DX were to take off, I’d expect book piracy to rear its ugly head, as it seems to be pretty easy to find all sorts of books in PDF in the darker corners of the Internet.
Ignoring the price and weight/size issue, I don’t think I would want to read a newspaper or text book on an eReader. It’s not how I work. I love reading a real newspaper — scanning through the pages to quickly identify what I want to read, jumping around, skipping somewhere else if an article turns out to be boring. I like reading fiction on my Sony eReader, but it’s generally a sequential/serial process. Start on page 1, read serially to page 350. Done.
Same with computer books: I love to own them in paper format. I also love to have a softcopy in PDF available, so I can always have it on my computer with me, and to make searching easier. But my primary reading will be done with the paper version.
You make a very good point. To each her/his own. I have not read a newspaper in “paper” form in more than 10 years, and would much rather ready ANY book on my screen (I have been doing it in slate tablet PCs since the old TC1000) than on paper, if I have the option. I even have scanned some old textbooks I use now and again to prepare class lectures (I teach) just so I don’t have to read them on paper.
So for me, this Kindle is a welcomed development, although I do hope that the comment above above the upcoming “iPad” is true. I would really jump on that one.
This is much closer to what the Kindle should have been. I’m interested, though the annotation and highlighting interface will make it or break it for me. Right now I think the annotation/highlighting interface looks somewhat clunky. Also the resolution is somewhat lower than I hoped for. But a good effort and an interesting device.
Anybody depending on annotation with that tiny keyboard will be sadly disappointed, I’m sure.
I have the K1 and K2. My comments:
I am extremely bummed that two months after I purchased the K2, they come out with what I view is a much better and more useful model. They SHOULD quickly offer K2 purchasers a trade-in or a 20% discount.
AMAZON continues to ignore the most important failing of the Kindle line: no ability to organize books. I have 67 books (and theoretically could have thousands) and NO ability to categorize and sort the titles in any way at all. I must scroll through them all. My wife’s K2 has only 12 books and she complains about not being able to sort them into read/unread, fiction/non-fiction, work/non-work…etc. etc. etc.
I personally very much value the large size of the DX, the rotating screen and the PDF capability. Those are meaningful and necessary improvements. Have you tried to read the NYT or New Yorker on your K1 or K2…the DX was needed.
Why should they offer you a discount on the DX? You chose to buy it knowing what you were getting.
I’ve been spoiled using my Tablet PC and PDF Annotator to mark up and highlight PDFs in color. I can’t bring myself to buy a Kindle or Sony Reader and sacrifice that feature.
That’s a good point and it shows a continuing problem. If the real effort were to get books into digital format and grow the market, then where are the readers for other formats? Why just the Kindle and the iPhone/iPod Touch. Why not Windows, why not Mac, why not Windows Mobile and RIM and Android? I understand these things take time and I was very impressed with the initial effort on the iPod Touch. But it’s a big glaring hole.
The light weight, excellent screen and long battery life of the Kindle are truly impressive and they do make for an enjoyable reading experience. But if has to expand.
Hopefully we’ll see some more software readers in the near future.