Amazon releases the rumoured large-screen Kindle | Hacker News Reader

Amazon releases the rumoured large-screen Kindle

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112 pointsjrockway106 comments

The killer feature is that it reads PDFs natively now (i.e., without having to convert them). For someone who prefers to read on screen and who has to read a lot of PDFs, this is very exciting.

This is really cool. I have the Kindle 2 and the PDF conversion on many books is really bad, but especially programming books. However, the Kindle DX looks huge. I'm not sure I could carry that thing around the same way I do the Kindle 2.

As stated a few places. I think this may work well for students that need to carry around many large/heavy textbooks. Since it would still fit nicely in a book bag. However, the price tag is a bit high for students, unless the textbooks are already included :)

Eh, eight semesters in college at $400 in books per semester comes out to $3200. An extra $500 wouldn't make a huge difference, and would make biking up the hill much easier. ;)

Better add the cost of a replacement policy to that total.

I'm thinking of getting my niece one when she goes to college, but that's still a couple years out so who knows what will be available by then. The point is, I'm sure many if not most of the students will not buy them directly but will have them bought for them by their parents, or others just as computers are now.

Noone else will say it, but I'm sure the piracy will pick up if it gets popular enough.

It sort of seems like it's massively in Amazon's interest if it does, right? They want eBooks to catch on like MP3s did, and the way to do that, it turns out, is a decade of massive piracy before the publishers finally give in.

I don't know if it's in Amazon's interest or not, but at least from my experience at Rutgers, it's more than true. Internal file sharing networks had PDF versions of nearly every textbook used in the CS and Math departments...

Where can those PDFs come from? Can I just send it files from my computer's hard drive and then read them on the Kindle, like an iPod for PDF?

It has a USB 2.0 port.

You get a kindle email address. You email PDFs to it and they automagically appear on your device. Although this costs $0.10 a pdf. You can also plug it in and it opens as a flash drive, then you just drag and drop. (In the case of the Kindle 2 you also have to convert to the right format, DX sounds like it will be easier)

Not anymore. http://pragdave.blogs.pragprog.com/pragdave/2009/05/amazon-t...

To summarize: The price of e-mailing your Kindle is now 15c/MB, rounded up.

Much less attractive.

The USB drag-and-drop still works, right? That's not quite as trivial, but still not particularly difficult.

the kindle 2 supports downloading files that you navigate to via the kindle's web browser. i would imagine the new one still lets you do this.

can it read protected PDFs also? I suppose that i can enter my password with the keyboard.

You can always just strip the DRM off on your computer.

Most NDAs aren't very lenient to stripping protections one of the parties has put on its data. Protected PDFs aren't really consumer products like video and audio, you usually want to follow the rules.

Protected PDFs are how most technical e-books are distributed.

How do you do that for simple password protected PDF's ?

Elcomsoft makes a product that can do it. They charge money, of course. Free alternatives can be found, if you care to look for them.

I'm an original Kindle owner and I hope that they backport the pdf viewing software. Pdf conversion using mobipocket creator gives mixed results.

Also, I purchased some technical books via Amazon where the images appear to be fixed resolution. For example, when I resize the text, the illustration still stays small. Sometimes the text in these illustrations are barely readable.

If I purchase the new Kindle, I hope that they will reconvert some of these books so it can take better advantage of the screen real estate.

Even though I probably won't buy one anytime soon, I'm much more excited about the big one for $500 over the little one for $350.

This looks like it will be a great product, especially for all the technical pdfs I've built up over the years.

Still not wild about the DRM though -- I made the mistake of buying DRMed music that I can't listen to anymore. I'm not going to do the same with books.

Anyone else trying to justify a $500 pdf reader? :)

I'm going to be using this to read technical books, a lot of which can cost between $50 to $100. Compared to the cost of my library, I think $500 is easily worth it for being able to take most of these books with me anywhere I go.

But how much do the PDF versions of the technical books cost ? And where do you get them? I am also trying to calculate the costs and see if I can throw the bookshelf away.

Free. Well - there's http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/

And then there's cough scribd cough

FWIW, I've already paid for my Kindle 1.0 in terms of book $$ saved, and the bookshelf I didn't have to buy.

The convenience of having dozens of books to read in my backpack is a cool bonus :-)

Yes, I am.

I'm salivating over the idea of replacing all of my textbooks with pdfs. But unfortunately I doubt I could get all of my textbooks on the kindle right now. And price is an issue. Checking on Amazon, there is not a large price difference between kindle textbooks, and real textbooks.

So the only reason I would get a dx is if the textbook and the kindle pdf were bundled together for a reasonable price. But I doubt that will happen.

To make the price difference worse- your physical textbooks have a resale value, while the digital files do not.

I'm not sure if it's obvious or not, but PDF's of many popular textbooks are widely available either free as in beer:

http://infolab.stanford.edu/~ullman/focs.html http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~vazirani/algorithms.html

Or free as in money from a bank robbery:

http://thepiratebay.org/browse/601/0/7

Still not wild about the DRM though -- I made the mistake of buying DRMed music that I can't listen to anymore.

The DRM that Amazon uses is pretty crappy (isn't it all), and is trivial to remove with a Python script available from various file-sharing services. But you didn't hear that from me, I know nothing about it...

Looks great but does anyone else think the price is a bit expensive? Not that this is a great comparison, but I can buy a netbook for $299 or less these days.

Why such a up-front hardware cost when Amazon will get recurring revenue from Kindle books? Are they taking a loss on the book sales to boost downloads?

Not that this is a great comparison, but I can buy a netbook for $299 or less these days.

It's expensive, but it may still be a good value. For example, an iPod costs more than a netbook too.

The e-ink screen is the major cost component.

Once you see the e-ink screen in person, the $500 price tag just doesn't matter. It's jaw-dropping. It is considerably better than you might imagine.

(I speak from experience with the Sony PRS-505, but it is my understanding that the kindle e-ink is almost identical.)

How fast are page turns for the big Kindle? (Checked amazon.com but didn't find that information.)

Good question.

This is what has stopped me from even considering an ebook so far.

I haven't seen the big Kindle, but I own the Kindle 2. Page turns are faster on a Kindle than they are with a paper book, although it's not as convenient for flipping ahead a few pages when you're quickly scanning for specific information. You notice page turns no more than you would with a paper book when reading novels, but it could be irritating for reference materials or text books.

I thought they all had a search feature to make looking for specific info faster. Is that not the case?

Yes.IIRC even the Kindle 1 had search.

Yes, but it's a pain to use - the keyboard isn't all that good for typing, and the on-screen response time of any interaction is pretty slow (maybe 0.5s)... still, great device for front-to-back reading.

I'm so tired of the netbook/iPhone comparison. It's apples and oranges. An ebook reader is a dedicated reading device. A netbook is a multi-function computer that could also be used for reading, but it lacks the ergonomics of an ebook reader and a screen specifically designed to eliminate the eye strain associated with computer screens.

Ebook readers and netbooks serve completely different purposes. You wouldn't want to buy a netbook for the specific purpose of reading ebooks any more than you'd want to buy a pair of rollerskates for transportation. Sure, they'd get the job done, but not nearly as well as a bicycle or car in most situations.

Because I believe Amazon is losing money on each ebook sold. They want people to move to their platform so badly that they're willing to accept a loss on each ebook and make it up with the hardware costs.

That makes no sense - the more books they sell, the more money they lose. No business should sell below their marginal cost for any length of time unless they're really desperate for market share. What's more common is selling the hardware at a loss, and reaping the profits on the e-books.

That sounds off. Any sources?

Um, don't Kindles come with lifetime of wireless access? Factor that in and they're reasonably priced.

The wireless access is only free when buying books I believe, not for general browsing.

(Someone correct me if I'm wrong)

The web browser on the Kindle is limited, but works fine for basic sites (Wikipedia, Google, Twitter, and many other mobile-optimized sites) and absolutely piggy-backs on the onboard (free) cell modem.

News.YC doesn't look terribly on it, either. ;)

I hope there is a way to disable auto-rotation for reading in bed. That is a big pet peeve with my iphone.

There seems to be. From the manual at http://s3.amazonaws.com/kindle/KindleDX_Users_Guide.pdf

The screen changes automatically when you rotate your Kindle from portrait to landscape or vice versa. Or, you can lock your screen to a particular orientation to fit your reading position.

However, since this is a much bigger device, I am not sure if reading in bed is going to work the same way it does for the iPhone.

All of the ebook readers I've liked for the iPhone let you disable auto-rotation - Stanza, BookShelf, the Kindle app...

Yep: http://g-ecx.images-amazon.com/images/G/01/kindle/nell/photo...

Every orientation you could want, even left-handed!

It doesn't auto-rotate if you tilt it so the home button's at the top.

I wonder how Safari Online would look/work on it. It would be great to have this display in combo with an online bookshelf.

This would be my dream combination. Right now I'm using an OLPC XO to read Safari Books, which works ok but could be better.

http://tlrobinson.net/blog/2009/04/06/using-olpc-xo-as-an-eb...

Will have to try your hack out on my OLPC as I was trying to use it for the same purpose and was frustrated for the same reasons. Thanks!

Can you load your own .txt files onto this? This is actually big enough to carry & review my source code without booting up a laptop.

Yes sir, Kindle 2 does it (via http://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/E-book_Reader_Matrix).

So does Kindle 1. For me the Kindle 2's killer feature is the text to voice.

How often do you browse your source code without the intent to edit it? Just curious if you have an interesting code review or development process because I don't think I've done that before.

Not often at all. I carry hard copy and multi-colored pens everywhere.

I just figured that if I'm spending $500 on a full page sized device, it sure would be nice to load all of my recent source code on it. I travel alot without a laptop and I'm always thinking about my work. I often follow the trail to a hard copy or an older module that I'm not carrying with me.

As a debugger, I always browse source code without ever editing it.

I wonder how PDF in larger paper formats (A4, US Letter) look on the bigger screen. They get rendered with illegibly small text on my Sony Reader (which has the same-size screen as the normal Kindle).

Too bad again, that the Kindle is US only.

I plan on getting Kindle DX even though I am based outside US presently. The wireless features are not that important to me, nice screen and native PDF support however is.

With the first kindle that was very difficult unless you had a US credit card with a US address.

get a friend in the USA to buy one and bring it over. That's what I plan to do once someone confirms that technical books display well on it.

My dad just bought a Kindle 2 with his Indian credit card and Indian billing address (although he used my Amazon account and shipped it to my American address)

I'll consider getting one of these things when TAOCP looks decent in it.

How does TAOCP look in it? I'm curious to know what the limits of what this device can display are.

Mathematics books are really crappy too. The conversion to Ebooks screws up the typesetting completely and makes a lot of things hard to read or follow.

The kindle is in a strange position now.

The more features they add (like native PDF) the more people will clamor to make it more input friendly (like the talk of a wacom-esque interface below).

Here's hoping Amazon knows where to draw the line and it just remains a damn good way to read text.

To me, that's the killer feature that it's missing. For a small reader, it doesn't matter, but for the large one, I want to be able to take notes, sketch out ideas in the margin, and so on.

Based on the price of this one, I think we'll see the small Kindle go down in price soon. Because right now it doesn't make any sense to buy the small one.

I still wont' buy one, chances are they'll release a color version in a couple of months, thats the next obvious step

Obvious but orders of magnitude harder in difficulty. I'm thinking 2 years, from a Japanese company.

The problem here is that nobody can release a similar device and get adoption because they don't have the content. Similar to iTunes and the iPod. I'm pretty sure this is going to be a device monopoly.

The only people that could pull off a licensing deal would be Barnes and Noble or Borders and they don't seem to be in a position to do that. At least Apple has the Zune Store as competition (as much as it sucks). Amazon's going to have nothing. Sony can't compete on device technology alone without the ability to get content onto those devices easily.

I think an O'Reilly Safari ebook reader could work. Or maybe a Google ebook reader could take advantage of the book rights registry.

If the release comes from Japan, it will start in Japan, with Japanese content. Tie-ups with B&N would be a good deal for both sides. The Japanese have talked about this for years. One of the first targets would be the newspaper publishers. They have the infrastructure to pull off a wireless distribution channel from the train stations. (curiously this didn't happen with Sony).

But, I could be very wrong, and Taiwan might actually be first mover: http://www.epapercentral.com/pvi-to-mass-produce-ereaders.ht...

If they are though, funnily it would not start in Taiwan with Taiwanese content.

Based on the price of this one, I think we'll see the small Kindle go down in price soon. Because right now it doesn't make any sense to buy the small one.

I have a story that supports this. My Mom just bought the Kindle 2 last night for my Dad's birthday. I called her this morning and told her about this new one and she immediately canceled and ordered this one. The main reason - with a bigger screen he can boost the font size a little bit more and maybe not have to wear his reading glasses. This may not be a big deal for our generation, but it is for our parent's generation.

Are there even any color e-ink type displays in the lab?

Yep: http://www.engadget.com/2006/07/27/hitachi-showing-off-color...

Still a few years away from production, though.

Supposedly Fujitsu has one, using their own e-ink like screen (they call it "FLEpia"). It has Wifi, has a web browser, and runs Windows CE.

http://activitypress.com/2009/02/22/fujitsu-trials-colour-e-...

Supposedly, will be out in 2010.

You know what would be awesome? The same thing ... but even bigger. Gotta love creative engineering and lazy product evolution.

No in all honesty this new Kindle looks pretty awesome, but also a little ridiculous when held compared with other electronics.

I just want them to get rid of the keyboard. Isn't there some rule about size vs time-you-actually-spend-using-the-feature? At its present size, I'd say that if you're not using the keyboard 1/4 of the time you're using the Kindle, then it's too big.

Not having a keyboard would make it a pain in the ass to search for content. Amazon is highly vested in making it easy for you to get more content. Yadda yadda, the keyboard aint going anywhere.

Don't be that sure, I can envision a version with a single button activating the voice recognition software that will allow you to download whatever you want.

A software keyboard is much more likely. It shouldn't be too long before E Ink displays can reliably/cheaply handle touch input.

source? I'd like to see news on such tech,

http://eink.com/kits/amepd.html

they could always go with a virtual keyboard now that the refresh times of the screen are getting better.

and you would push keys on that with what? it's not a touch screen.

You know, if this wasn't iPod white, I'd swear I'd seen something just like it on TV before...

http://www.slipperybrick.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/01/stpd...

Goodnews. When is this going to be available in the UK?

I'm there if I can read PDFs on it (check), subscribe to Le Monde (check), the New York Times (check), The Economist and The Guardian. I can see a device like this making me spend more on subscriptions than I currently do because of the convenience and lack of paper to recycle.

I guess I might buy the occasional book, although I really like paper books.

Does anyone know of a similar reader at about the same price point which supports annotation of the text (for example with a stylus)?

The Kindle does support limited annotation — highlighting, bookmarks, and text notes.

iRex Iliad - http://www.irextechnologies.com/products/iliad ... a bit pricey though, 599 Euros

Also (with bigger screen), the iRex Digital Reader 1000S: https://www.irexshop.com/product_info.php?cPath=22_35&pr... (has wacom-style input)

My, this is going to be a hit. I sorely desire a wacom on it though :(((

I live in India. So probably the EVDO / 3G connection won't work here. Does the Kindle DX also support vanilla WiFi so that I can still buy books from Amazon?

It looks great. Now let's compare it to the competition... Amazon's web page for the Kindle shows only one entry under 'Browse similar items in Electronics': 'Kindle DX'

(retailers must love you ;-)

iRex Digital Reader 1000S, 699 EUR; https://www.irexshop.com/

    10.2 Inch (diagonal) electronic paper display
    1024 x 1280 pixel resolution at 160 pixels per inch
    16-level grey scale
    Mini-USB connector
    Wacom® penabled® touch sensor input with Stylus
    ...

More data and opinions over at http://mobileread.com, etc.

P.S. I tossed this in because iRex is not using the same screens as most everybody else: http://www.eink.com/products/matrix/High_Res.html (found via MobileRead). I had nearly forgotten that.

"Kindle DX will be released this summer"

Amazon is just afraid of the incoming Apple iPad.

Very afraid...

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