Kindle!
I’m probably one of the few folks who, upon seeing the Kindle and Kindle 2, thought, “I really want one of those, but it’s just too small for me to read textbooks and manuals on.” Well, Amazon heard our wishes and responded with the Kindle DX, which was officially released yesterday. I pre-ordered mine the day it was announced and it finally arrived in the mail today. A lot of people say the Kindle is too expensive, or too locked-down to be really useful to them, but it’s perfect for me.
With the Kindle DX I can carry hundreds of reference books in a package about 1/4 as thick as my Eee. I’m the kind of person who will be in the middle of reading five or six books at a time. Usually some sort of pulpy sci-fi, some hard sci-fi, a couple of non-fiction books, a serious study book or two. . . all at the same time. With the Kindle, I can take them all with me, and many more. Sure, I have to purchase some of them again in Kindle format (my only real complaint), but most of the textbooks I buy come with a PDF version and the Kindle DX is a native PDF reader. Previous versions of the Kindle required PDFs to be converted to .mobi format for reading (a free service from Amazon.com).
The e-ink screen is just awesome. Reading the Kindle is just as easy on the eyes as reading a real book. The main reason I bought the Kindle, in fact, is that I find I cannot read from a backlit LCD screen for a long period of time. Sure, I can work on a computer all day without trouble, or play video games for hours on end, but I can’t read a novel or a long PDF, even in white-on-black text, for too long before my eyes are screaming for relief. The Kindle solves that problem, forming a perfect union of electronic geekery and dead-tree reading.
Here are some photos of the Kindle DX next to some other books for comparison.
