Amazon's full size PDF reader, the Kindle DX, is back | Hacker News Reader

Amazon's full size PDF reader, the Kindle DX, is back

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33 pointsTerretta47 comments

There may be things the DX is good for. PDFs are not one of them. The DX is heavy, and the Amazon PDF software was pretty terrible. The biggest problem is that most PDFs worth reading are the print-layout 2-column format, which is hard to cram into a small screen like the DX's.

I found a Nexus 7, which weighs less and has about the same resolution, to be far superior, because at least you can scroll around easily.

In most cases, I end up actually printing out any long papers I want to read, because I've found no good way to view them electronically. It's idiotically backwards, considering all the advances in tech.

I'd love to use e-ink to read papers, but so far there doesn't seem to be a good way. I'd happily pay for software that can properly change 2-column PDF layouts into single-column.

>I'd happily pay for software that can properly change 2-column PDF layouts into single-column.

...what have you tried? I like K2pdfopt:

http://www.willus.com/k2pdfopt/

...not perfect, but works better than anything else I've tried.

That looks great; I'll have to try it out. I don't recall what software I tried before. They all promised stuff but it came out garbage, especially when charts and stuff were involved.

Great, I've been looking for something similar as well. Thanks for sharing

I found the DX to be fairly good for reading peer reviewed journal articles - LaTeX and most journal layouts are pretty graphics light, so don't tax the PDF software so much.

This comment highlights how print-oriented and inflexible PDF is. I hope that now that we have ePub, PDF-only content will become increasingly rare. Does PDF still have any advantages over ePub or web pages?

Academic publications. The tool stack is significantly better targeting PDF or PS (especially from LaTeX). I've tried a bunch of the random tools for either converting, directly generating, or rendering PDFs in HTML, and they aren't pixel-perfect.

Besides the fact that most commercial monitors have pitiful ppi, the fact that monitor manufacturers are selling mostly widescreen monitors with a poverty of vertical room drives me crazy. It's hard to read a pdf of a book when its resolution makes it hard to fit a single page onto your screen. There is something about continuous scrolling that makes it harder for me to remember the text that I'm reading.

So a large screen e-reader (that won't have any backlight issues) could be a great gadget to have. I tried a Kindle DX in 2010, but I found panning around in PDFs to be too slow for enjoyment. If and when the technology improves enough, there could be a big student market for a large screen e-ink reader that can display PDFs (or saner formats, like DJVU).

"There is something about continuous scrolling that makes it harder for me to remember the text that I'm reading."

Yes! I've tried both now, and I vastly prefer a page-turning interface over continuous scrolling. I can't really explain why, though. Is it just because I'm old?

http://www.magicscroll.net/ScrollTheWeb.html

Classic UI problem. Continuous Scrolling is extremely damaging to your concentration.

The issue is that group think and shear momentum prevents us from thinking of better ways to scroll text on computer screens. Strangely, the eInk format has brought back "page turning" (based on paper designs), which partially solve the problem.

What we all want is for the text to remain still while we're reading and scrolling.

Just don't make everybody give up scrolling (though I hate "infinite" scrolling that dynamically loads new comment and makes the page taller). I grew up with scrolling and prefer it over pagination for most types of content.

Buy two and flip 'em sideways.

Hopefully this new generation changes that. All of the major laptop / tablet companies (even for Windows computers) have resolutions of 1080p or higher.

http://www.engadget.com/2013/06/05/sharp-3200-1800-igzo/?utm...

For example, this new laptop screen from Sharp has 3200x1800 resolution on a 13-inch screen.

Resolution is finally "sexy" again, and in a few months, there will be a ton of devices that will be high resolution again.

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I love the idea of Kindle DX coming back. 3 weeks on one charge, a full size paper and e-ink for reading pleasure.

Its not quite the PDF reader I'm looking for. I consume a lot of PDFs in the form of data sheets and manuals for things like ARM cpus. I'd really like something closer to 12" diagonal with paper aspect ratios. Also 200+ ppi. At one point there was a 2560 x 1600 e-ink screen in the works but I don't think it ever saw the light of day unfortunately.

The retina iPad makes a reasonable replaceme, what it loses in size (too small) / power (too much so has to be plugged in) / readability (lots of glare, hard to read under bright workbench lights) it partially makes up for with rendering speed and color support.

If you haven't tried it, I used the "3M Natural View Fingerprint Fading Screen Protector with Back Skin" on my retina iPad and it made a world of difference. It doesn't change the quality of the screen, but it dramatically reduces glare and fingerprints. That said, putting it on requires some time and patience to get it just right and the bubbles out.

This news makes me happy. Not that much, because I'm still using my DX from 2010, but it shows Amazon still cares about it. My kindle is my favorite device. I've probably read at least 50 books on it, mostly for free. I'm getting into Dostoevsky. It reads fine. Most of them are the size of a normal piece of paper, and it's great for that as it's nearly the same size.

I used my friend's iPad for a couple months last year, and it was completely different. I used the iPad to read HN, watch tv, or read blogs. The kindle remained king of my book reading.

I was hoping to see a newer model when I read the title. Even though it's the same old model, it gives me hope that Amazon is still thinking about developing newer, large screen Kindles. Perhaps this is some kind of test to see how many people find the page, click on it, interact with the page, etc. They might use these metrics to help determine if they should develop a newer DX.

I love my DX. Before, I was using a Kindle Keyboard 3G. I missed the $279 sale last summer, but e-mailed Jeff Bezos a few days later, asking if he would honor the offer. One of his assistants tracked down my phone number, called me a few hours later, and helped me process the order.

Pro: The Large e-Ink screen.

Cons (personal): Page-turn buttons on only one side, no highlighting in PDFs.

Cons (general): No wi-fi, lower ppi compared to newer competitors.

I've been thinking about how a large e-ink screen could provide an endless series of black and white pictures to hang on my wall. But the normal kindle isn't big enough, one of these (or four of them hacked together) might be ...

Buying a DX screen replacement, hacking a controller out of an Arduino or sth. and hanging it on a wall sounds like a great project! Added to my TODO list ;).

I was briefly excited that this would be a new model, but ... no.

I guess they just found a few lost pallets at the factory, or something.

I have large hands, I read fast and I like to have lots of text onscreen at a time. Regular Kindles don't cut it for me.

As someone who bought the original DX the first day it was announced, it's not something you want to use for PDFs.

You want something that is in color and something that you can easily pinch/zoom/pan with.

E-ink is possibly the WORST platform for PDFs.

That really depends on the PDF. Most PDFs I read are CS papers (heavy on PL theory). The only pictures they have are commutative diagrams. For that, e-ink is pretty good.

Of course, screen size is a different story. I've had some luck getting the TeX sources and recompiling them to fit on the screen, but that's too much effort in general :P. Still, for the papers I tried that way, it's great.

Am I the only one that finds $299 to be way too much money for a single purpose device that really isn't that great at it's only purpose?

Bought a DXG refurb in early 2012 for $207. I use it every day. I would be hard pressed to justify buying these for family members for $300.

The fact that they "brought it back" from a significant hiatus without making any improvement to it whatsoever suggests to me that this is a "last hurrah".

I love my DX. Normal sized kindles (non-DX) simply don't cut it for me. DX's are very comfortable on the eyes.

Ok, you got me I live under a rock. I wasn't even aware it was "gone". Did they stop selling this temporarily?

yup. i think it disappeared when the paperwhite was announced.

Cool, but this is still the same old 150ppi screen. Not the updated 212ppi screen like on the paperwhite.

Personally I don't need the backlight, but I'm not gonna buy something for reading that is only 150ppi. I really do want a large format kindle like this but can't do the barbaric screen.

"Barbaric"? Seriously?

150ppi? What is this, the dark ages?

Fuck yeah, seriously. The times have changed!

Honest question: is it any good? I deal with A LOT of pdf files on a daily basis (theoretical physics) and I've always wanted a big-screen, e-ink reader (plus free wireless access to Wikipedia, if I remember correctly).

This might even be the one with full free 3G browsing, full stop. I believe I remember that being available on the K3 Keyboard and the DX.

Probably a bad idea if you want to take notes or quickly skim through content. Pretty good though if you want to read from cover to cover without making to much fuzz with notes etc.

Not interested in taking notes -- and yes, I read those files thoroughly (and, sometimes, painfully...) from the beginning to the end.

As long as your pdfs translate well to grayscale it should be fine.

The new kindle web browser is quite nice (I believe it uses webkit) but isn't something you'll want to use for anything that you want to get done quickly.

I haven't tried this new DX but I love eink screens and feel that they are much easier to read than laptop/ipad or other birgh screens.

I think it's the same ol' DX, just back in stock.

I don't know anything about the Kindle DX, but I do think K2pdfopt is an essential piece of software for reading PDFs on an e-reader (I have a Kobo Glo). It allows you to reflow the text, and convert two column text into a single column. Even image based (scanned) PDFs.

http://www.willus.com/k2pdfopt/

Not really. Too slow, low dpi compared with current Kindles, no wifi and it's 3G only.

A colleague bought one expecting to read papers on it & as far as I know has barely used it. That said, it is better than the other Kindles if you want to read a lot of A4 PDFs & can cope with the slow (oh so slow) page turn.

Until the retina iPad, I preferred my old original Kindle DX for reading black and white PDFs.

I now prefer the retina iPad for PDFs I need to rapidly navigate, but still appreciate the DX for reading research.

I felt it was good when it first came out. After using the Kindle Paperwhite with touchscreen, it was hard for me to go back to the DX.

One of the most annoying parts about the DX was the PDF zoom. If the margins on your PDF are too big, the zoom doesn't function to remove the margins and zoom in towards the center. If I remember correctly, it zooms towards the left, leaving right half of the page cut off and still fat margins. It was so bad with some textbooks and papers that I had to go manually cut out the margins of the PDFs using an editor.

You can always read PDFs in Landscape mode, but that tended to be clunky on anything with 2 columns. In landscape mode, 1 page will become 2-3 "pages" that need to be traversed back and forth to read the separate columns. The Kindle caches the next page of the PDF but not the previous, so using the back button on PDFs could take a little bit depending on how big the PDF file was.

I have one and a nasty case of buyers remorse:

1. PDF reading is the pits

2. The device is just big/heavy enough for me to never want it with me. Won't fit in any pocket, bulks up my slim briefcase, is hard to handle with one hand.

I'm waiting a while to allow myself to get a paperwhite.

All that said, you can have mine for $99 if you need one!

In order to find this attractive, one has to really want an e-ink display.

There are many fairly decent 10" Android tablets for less than US$299.

Like someone else said, they must have found a lost pallet at the warehouse and decided to sell them.

Given both my wife and her mother vastly prefer the DX, and were rather upset that no replacement existed when the screen broke on our old one, I'm glad it's back.

Neither one of them cared for the Paperwhite.

Auto-rotate is not a feature. I hate auto-rotate on my iphone.

Also, the lack of the backlight is crazy. Reading in bed is amazing with the Paperwhite.

Hey, I felt like an idiot for not finding it sooner when I discovered this. So maybe it helps you or someone : if you double tap the home button, then scroll the app dock left, there's a button to disable auto-rotation on your iPhone.

Thank you. And now i can feel like an idiot. That's ok. I was on my iphone3G on IOS 3.0 until 6 months ago, so i was on an ancient OS before this. That was the last IOS version that let you upload a carrier file to unlock tethering (even if it had the SMS exploit).

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