Amazon reveals $79 Kindle
engadget.com
engadget.com
"These are high-end products"
That's the first phrase of the first paragraph after the product image.
I'm not saying they need to cover them in alcantara, but the old smooth-matte finish is much better than this.
Any thoughts?
Update: Just saw fribblerz's comment about the DX. But I am still curious about the other Kindles.
I used briss to convert some big pdf books (On Lisp and I think a free version of SICP) so they would be a little more readable. briss does some clipping of the margins.
I love tech books in print form, but I prefer a tech book I can drop on the kindle now. The raw convenience of the kindle wins out for me.
If the DX gets cheap, I may be forced to grab one. I won't be upgrading to the new color device.
Of course, this can be avoided if they are not PDF out of neccesity. If the book is all text, not heavily formatted, and you just have it in PDF for convienience, look into getting an eBook copy.
Note: I use a 2nd gen Kindle. The newer models might be a little snappier.
I've found that most technical PDF papers are non-trivial to convert to Kindle. It would be one thing if they were scaled down to a format that only required vertical scrolling, but as it stands unless the author/publisher makes an effort, most technical PDFs require horizontal and vertical scrolling. Certainly possible, but hardly convenient.
The small kindles aren't really appropriately sized for them, and the Kindle DX isn't cheap enough to me not just buy another iPad.
I had posted a similar comment earlier today about this.
I love the keyboard for note taking when reading technical books on the kindle. That way I can come back months or years later and just read my notes to refresh my memory.
The hi-lighting option is also great for this. It's like instant cliff's notes.
if you don't want to read the book then you can just search amazon for the hi-lights that people have made public for the book and you've got your cliff's notes without having to read the text yourself:)
It's just a shame that there's no text-to-speech, which would be really killer on this, the lightest model in the lineup. I find TTS really useful, especially for non-fiction, essays and news (conveying the nuances of fiction, particularly dialogue, can be awkward with TTS). I think the feature's been buried by way of being awkwardly placed in the text-size menu of previous Kindles. I'd say %90 of Kindle owners I talk to have never used it or don't know the functionality is even there.
At the very least, I hope Amazon puts it in their iOS/Android apps.
Next step: make e-books cheaper!
http://www.amazon.com/Kindle-version-expensive-paperback-ver...
Don't sell your freedoms that easily. I'd rather have Amazon sell the DRM-free.
Though my other half (who I bought a K3 for then) thinks losing the keyboard basically breaks its search function and is happy she got the one she has.