Kindle DX: Amazon’s New Addition To The Kindle Family
Slim: Just over 1/3 of an inch, as thin as most magazines
Carry Your Library: Holds up to 3,500 books, periodicals, and documents
Beautiful Large Display: 9.7″ diagonal e-ink screen reads like real paper; boasts 16 shades of gray for clear text and sharp images
Auto-Rotating Screen: Display auto-rotates from portrait to landscape as you turn the device so you can view full-width maps, graphs, tables, and Web pages
Built-In PDF Reader: Native PDF support allows you to carry and read all of your personal and professional documents on the go
Wireless: 3G wireless lets you download books right from your Kindle DX, anytime, anywhere; no monthly fees, no annual contracts, and no hunting for Wi-Fi hotspots
Books In Under 60 Seconds: You get free wireless delivery of books in less than 60 seconds; no PC required
Long Battery Life: Read for days without recharging
Read-to-Me: With the text-to-speech feature, Kindle DX can read newspapers, magazines, blogs, and books out loud to you, unless the book’s rights holder made the feature unavailable
Big Selection, Low Prices: Over 275,000 books; New York Times Best Sellers and New Releases are only $9.99, unless marked otherwise
More Than Books: U.S. and international newspapers including the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, magazines including The New Yorker and Time, plus popular blogs, all auto-delivered wirelessly
]]>So how about an e-book reader that actually opens like a book? That seems like a good idea, given that the book in its current form has about 2,000 years of popularity behind it, after supplanting scrolls. But appearances can be deceiving.
The $499 Entourage Edge, which comes out this week, looks like a small laptop when folded. Hold it by the spine like a book, and it opens to reveal two screens. On one side is an ”electronic ink” screen for reading. On the other is a full-color touch screen that can be used not just to buy books, but to surf the Web, play music and write e-mail.
Unfortunately, this is less of review and more of a word of warning: The Edge doesn’t do its job. It has a couple of flaws that are enough to make it a failure. Then it has one huge flaw that is enough to make it a failure with no help from other flaws.
The big flaw is atrocious battery life. The Edge doesn’t go into a proper standby mode when closed, so its battery is drained after about 10 hours of inactivity. The only way to make it last longer is to turn it off completely. But when you turn it back on, it takes a minute and a half to boot up. That’s way too long, considering that you can flip open a paper book and start reading in a few seconds. Other e-readers, such as Amazon.com Inc.’s Kindle, last longer on standby and turn on faster.
Entourage Systems Inc., the startup behind the product, says it’s working on getting the Edge to consume less power when closed, and hopes to be able to send a software update out in June.
The other problems with the Edge are that it’s heavy, at about 3 pounds. The Kindle weighs two-thirds of a pound. For $499, you’d expect the Edge to have cellular wireless access for book and newspaper downloads, as the $259 Kindle and the $400 Sony Reader Daily Edition do. Instead, it has only Wi-Fi access.
The flaws aside, the Edge is an interesting device. It’s the most capable e-reader yet, but it’s likely to hold that honor for less than two weeks, until Apple Inc.’s iPad tablet comes out April 3.
The Edge’s color touch screen is powered by Android, Google Inc.’s software for cell phones. It can play music and movies in addition to surfing the Web. You can tap out e-mails or notes on the screen. You can plug in USB ”thumb drives” and SD cards to load files. The Edge comes with its own online book store, but it can also show books from other stores, if they’re in the right format (ePub with Adobe DRM). However, to read books from other stores you have to download them to a computer, then transfer them to the Edge through a USB cable or a memory card.
It’s tough to design a good user interface that stretches over two screens with very different characteristics. Barnes & Noble Inc.’s Nook is a prime example. Like the Edge, it pairs an e-ink screen with a color touch screen, albeit a much smaller one. That’s a confusing setup. It constantly forces users to switch their gaze between the screens to figure out what to do. The Edge does better in this regard, because more functions are manipulated from the large touch screen.
It still feels awkward that you can control the color screen by touching it while you need to pull out a stylus to use the e-ink screen. And some functions send you hunting from screen to screen. For instance, to search for a word in a book, you press an icon on the e-ink side with a stylus, then move over to the color side to tap out the word. If the color screen has turned itself off to conserve power, you won’t know that the word-search window is up until you turn on that screen by pressing a button.
This is an attempt to get around a key limitation of e-ink: Although it supposedly is a more natural display for reading, it is very slow to update from image to image, making typing and navigation awkward.
However, I find a high-quality backlit LCD color screen to be more legible than e-ink, not less. And a device with one responsive screen is much easier to use and lighter than one with two. We’ll see. Maybe the iPad will show people that reading on LCDs isn’t so bad, after all.
]]>“They’re better than regular books,” Ruml, 38, said of e-readers like Amazon’s Kindle. “They’re lighter, and if you’re trying to get under your covers to read, you can just use one hand. The page doesn’t have that gutter (the space between the edge of the text and the page binding). You can read faster.”
Also: the bookstore is always open, and what you buy doesn’t stack up in the house. “If I own the paper book because I intend to read it,” she said, “I will instead download it on the Kindle.”
The popularity of the Kindle and of Apple’s new iPad mean this might be the first summer in which many people bring an electronic reading device with them to the park or on vacation instead of packing several actual books.
Book sales have declined in each of the last several years, but the e-book market has exploded. The Association of American Publishers reported earlier this month that e-book sales in 2009 were up 176.6 percent over 2008. The iPad will likely drive the 2010 growth even higher.
But if the rise of the e-book is inevitable, what will it change about the way we read? How will books themselves be different?
“I’ve not seen any significant sign of writers changing the way they write,” said Richard Nash, the former publisher of Soft Skull Press whose thoughts on the future of publishing led Utne Reader to name him one of 50 visionaries changing the world. “What I have seen are enormous changes in how writers connect with readers.
“It’s the Twitter-ing novelist: Neil Gaiman and Colson Whitehead and Margaret Atwood and Susan Orlean. The author is not someone you see on a dais once a year at a university or a bookstore where you get 15 seconds with him.”
A radical change
The e-book also increases the number of authors who can make their work available, by going around big publishers and even bookstores.
For small publishers or self-published authors, e-books have vastly reduced the difficulty of reaching an audience, according to Mark Coker, founder of the self-publishing platform Smashwords. “Up until a few years ago, authors really had no choice,” Coker said. “If they wanted to reach an audience, they had to go through that traditional system.”
]]>It’s fast. “Applications literally fly open, and browsing the Web on Safari is way faster than on the iPhone (News – Alert),” he says.
On the not-so-great side, Patterson says, “Good luck reading e-books in direct sunlight. The beauty of the Kindle’s black-and-white e-ink screen is that text stands out quite nicely when you’re reading in the sun. On the iPad, however, the color display looks disappointingly washed out in direct sunlight, problematic for reading e-books poolside.”
Just a thought here: Wonder if it’s possible to switch to black and white display, instead of color? Just because it’s possible to render in color doesn’t mean it’s always best to do so, does it? Woody Allen agrees with us on this, by the way.
Frankly we’re not all that interested in buying an iPad, but this does remove one concern we did have: “The iPad’s virtual QWERTY keypad isn’t nearly as terrible as many had warned,” Patterson reports, adding that “I’ve managed to bang out a few decent-sized emails on the thing.”
However, it might not be the most type-friendly device made. To type one needs to “prop it (awkwardly) in your lap to type,” or “place it flat on a table – not the best solution due to the iPad’s curved back,” or “hold it in one hand and tap with the other, effectively slashing your possible WPM” or buy a stand at $40 and up.
Other points Patterson brings out: “HD videos look amazing. Absolutely gorgeous” – good. “Reflections on the display are pretty distracting” – ugly.
]]>When you are in doubt, it would be better if you spare time to read some of the Kindle Reviews that are available online. These said reviews usually come from those who already own one of these devices or who had the experience of using one of them. These reviews are not all good reviews. Some of them disclosed the downsides of this device.
If you haven’t read some of its reviews, then the next lines will tell you some of them. In one of its reviews, Kindle was described as similar to a Sony Reader when it comes to its weight and size. It has been checked that one of its downsides falls with the E lnk technology which makes the screen to take second to refresh. That sounds irritating to some but it was said that the designers of Kindle have done a great job in limiting the delay. Another review deals on the SD-card slot of Kindle. It was suggested that it is preferable if the SD-card slot was not hidden behind the Kindle’s back cover. On the other hand, its battery was admired for being user-replaceable and user-friendly.
A number of good reviews about this device are noticeable. To mention one, it has the best button layout that was designed. Its home button is said to be the best button because a single click to that will allow you to check the main list page of all your content. You can also use its scroll wheel to choose and sort the list by author, date, or title and show books or periodicals. Aside from that, it will also enable you to have access to Wikipedia so that you are armed with it wherever you go.
More of these Kindle Reviews are available for your access online. By checking those reviews, you will encounter some of its negative sides but digging deeper will make you see the good reasons why you should have one of them. Where To Buy Kindle is probably the next question you’ll have in mind after checking those reviews. The answer lies with Amazon and eBay. They are leading online stores that offer these Kindles for sale.
]]>But as we move into the era of e-books, that assumption no longer holds.
In certain cases, you can’t read the electronic book you buy from one store on a device supported by a competing store. Similarly, you can’t read e-books you borrow from your library if you don’t have the right kind of device. And there’s a chance you won’t be able to read the e-books you buy today on the e-book reader you own several years from now.
Does anyone in the books business realize how dumb this is? Seems not. Because just when the situation seemed to be getting better, it suddenly got worse.
E-books — books available in digital form and typically distributed over the Internet — have been around for years. But they’ve only really started to take off in recent years with the release of portable e-book readers by Sony and Amazon.com.
Amazon’s Kindle was a top seller during the holidays for the online store. For books that it offers in both digital and physical editions, Amazon sells six e-books for every 10 traditional ones. Meanwhile, Sony sold four times more Readers this past December than it did the previous one.
Many other companies are jumping into the business. Barnes
& Noble recently launched its Nook device. Technology companies such as Plastic Logic and DMC Worldwide plan to launch their own competing devices and e-book stores later this year.And then there’s Apple. One of the key features of its recently unveiled iPad is the iBooks app, which includes both an e-book reader and a digital bookstore.
Until Apple announced its iPad, you could have argued that the industry seemed to be solving the compatibility problem. Although numerous e-book formats have existed over the years, the industry seemed to be coalescing around a standard called EPUB that was specifically designed for use by e-books. And many bookstores and libraries that wanted to limit what consumers could do with e-books had signed on to digital rights management (DRM) software from Adobe.
As of last month, that widespread support for EPUB and Adobe’s DRM left Amazon, which uses its own proprietary file format and copy protection technology, as the only major holdout. That’s a big deal because of the popularity of the Kindle, but there was a chance that market pressure for a standard might eventually force Amazon to acquiesce.
But thanks to the iPad and iBooks, the pressure on Amazon just got a lot lighter. As Steve Jobs noted when he introduced the iPad, iBooks is supporting the EPUB format. What he didn’t say, though, was that Apple plans to use its own DRM software to wrap around its books, not Adobe’s.
That means you won’t be able to read books you buy in iBooks on your Nook or Sony Reader, even though they’re all in the EPUB format. It also means that you won’t be able to use the iBooks app to read books you purchase from Barnes & Noble or Sony, or the e-books you borrow from your library.
Apple has already shown great ability to sell digital content such as music and movies, and there’s every reason to believe that it will become a big player in the e-books market as well. If it does, two of the industry’s biggest players will be offering e-books that are incompatible not only with each other’s readers, but with those of the rest of the business.
To be sure, there are some ways around the problem. Both Amazon and Barnes & Noble offer e-book applications for Apple’s iPhone. Assuming that Apple will allow those programs to run on the iPad, consumers could still access e-books bought from those two stores on the device. They just wouldn’t be able to read them with the iBooks app. And they still couldn’t read books bought from iBooks on a Kindle or a Nook.
The lack of compatibility may not matter in many cases. I rarely want to reread, or even keep, popular fiction books. Similarly, many consumers may not mind not being able to move books to a new device if they switch to a reader with a different format.
But there are lots of books I’ve kept in my library for years. Even if I rarely refer back to them, I love that I can.
I don’t think people will lose that attachment to certain books as they move to digital readers. But they may lose their ability to maintain their libraries unless publishers, bookstores and makers of the devices find some way to play nice with each other.
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