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Comment by j_s | Hacker News Reader

Any input from lurking Kindle DX owners? Sounds like they are available around $200.

http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=kindle+dx

My Kindle DX is one of the best device purchases I've ever made. I got mine for $299 right before it was phased out and still enjoy using it to disconnect from the digital world.

PDFs are especially great on it...you can enjoy the original fonts, design, and layout in the original (often larger) size.

EPUBs are the weakest because (1) they're not officially supported and (2) converting leads to huge fonts. There's probably a way to fix (2) but I haven't bothered as I find my phone a better medium to read EPUBs.

I've had one from amazon warehouse deals for a while (around $200 ~2 years ago too). Completely worth it for the screen size when working, studying and for fun. Wish they had a touch screen version and thin bezel.

I bought it specifically for reading pdf papers, and haven't been disappointed. Can't complain about the free 3g, and occasional browser use either if you flash it to 3.2.1 or higher from the kindle keyboard.

You will take away my Kindle DX from my hands only when I die.

- Huge screen for PDF

- Great for technical books

- no backlit means I can read for hours

- decent batteries

My use case: I read mostly non fiction (technical books, business books with diagrams).

I feel like a dinosaur when on an airplane but there is no way I can read my books in these tiny Kindles.

Anybody who has my same use case believes it's time for me to finally upgrade from this old yet trusty DX thing?

I am starting to feel a little Self conscious!

>no backlit means I can read for hours

You can read for a lot of hours on a tablet, which is a lot better than Kindle epaper for the types of material you describe. There was a time when some sort of epaper/LCD convergence seemed to make a lot of sense. Today, though, while I prefer a small Kindle for flow of text, an LCD tablet really does win for formatted and graphical content. I still prefer paper for some situations but, given digital, there's really nothing wrong with tablets.

I had a DX. I found the PDF support to be useful, but too slow. It was difficult to use it as a reference device, but it worked ok for linear reading.

I migrated to iPads once the iPad 2 came out and never really looked back.

Same experience--PDF rendering was too slow even for a lot of linear reading. I remember once opening a statistical text (Springer has a lot of freely downloadable content if you're at a university). I think it was a Bayesian text with a plot showing model convergence. Because the graphic was a vector plot containing lots of line segments, the page would take several minutes to render.

I loved the screen though. I'd love to have a DX sized reader with even the processing power of a raspberry pi. Actually, I'd love something with a keyboard cover that let me do emacs in the sunshine, but that's an altogether different story.

I would get one if I was sure that Amazon would keep supporting it. I would be nervous about it being locked out from the Kindle store soon.

I dread the day mine stops working. I'm overseas and when they first came out I wanted one, so paid a fortune to some place in Malaysia that bought them in bulk from the US, added a couple of hundred dollars and resold them. I've never regretted spending that much on it.

I have an ipad as well now, but I prefer reading fiction on the DX.

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