Amazon this week announced the Kindle DX, a larger version of the original. The Kindle DX at $489 weighs 18.9 ounces compared to the earlier Kindle $359 at 10.2 ounces. It is touted for reading textbooks, newspapers, magazines and PDFs at potentially huge cost savings over printing and distributing paper-based products.
The Kindle DX, about 1/3" thick, has a 9.7" screen with 16 shades of gray, about 2.5 time the size of the earlier B/W model (known as the Kindle 2,) making it easier to represent 8.5" x 11" sheets as well as newspaper pages, including advertising and photos. It has 3.3 GB of storage, enough to hold about 3,500 books and can download additional material from Amazon via 3G cellular towers in about 60 seconds. There are no wireless fees or contracts.
Kindle DX can also read text out loud to you, provided the copyright holder allows it. It also can host an eight GB SD card for copying from internal memory or importing external data and music files.
Everyone has an opinion on where this technology is going and Amazon is not without competition. Their biggest advantage of Amazon's Kindle seems to be their legal arrangements for content.
The New York Times, The Boston Globe and The Washington Post plan pilot programs offering the new Kindle at a discount to some readers who sign up for subscriptions to read the news on the device. However, the Times/Globe in their usual short-sighted way, won't offer Kindle subscriptions in areas where their print edition is available.
Three textbook publishers (Pearson PLC, Cengage Learning and John Wiley & Sons Inc.) have agreed to sell books on the device. Collectively, they publish 60 percent of all higher-education textbooks, according to Amazon.
About six universities have agreed to run Kindle pilots in the fall, including Pace, Arizona State University, Case Western Reserve University, Princeton University, Reed College and the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia.
But Kindle and some other e-book readers have lots of drawbacks. No color and little or no interactivity. For example, only a few readers allow making "notes in the margins." And people used to the wonders of HTML and the web will find huge shortcomings in e-book readers. Even the iPhone is superior in that sense.
For all those reasons, the future of electronic books is very uncertain. The potential cost advantage is the only convincing element in the mix. But it also has to be an acceptable medium to the end user.
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