Update: It’s 8:26 am PST and the Kindle DX product page is now up - Kindle DX at Amazon.
If you search for it, three pages show up …
Kindle DX for $489
The Kindle DX is available for $489 and the case is available separately for $49.99. There is no estimated delivery date. They simply say to reserve your place and you will be notified when it’s available.
Great job on the pricing by Amazon. When you consider that the other large screen ereader is $800+, then $489 seems great.
The Big Features -
- In Built PDF Support
- Rotating Display i.e. Portrait and Landscape mode.
- 9.7″ screen with 16 shades of grayscale.
- Just 0.3 inches thick.
- Dimensions are 10.4″ x 7.2″ x 0.38″.
- Weighs just 18.9 ounces.
In terms of textbooks, agreements with 3 big publishers and coverage of 60% of textbooks -
Leading textbook publishers Cengage Learning, Pearson, and Wiley, together representing more than 60 percent of the U.S. higher education textbook market, will begin offering textbooks through the Kindle Store beginning this summer. Textbooks under the following brands will be available: Addison-Wesley, Allyn & Bacon, Benjamin Cummings, Longman & Prentice Hall (Pearson); Wadsworth, Brooks/Cole, Course Technology, Delmar, Heinle, Schirmer, South-Western (Cengage); and Wiley Higher Education.
Textbook brands include -
- Pearson.
- Addison Wiley
- Longman
- Prentice Hall
- Cengage Learning
- Allyn & Bacon
- Benjamin Cummings
- Wadsworth
- Brooks Cole
- Course TEchnology
- Delmar
- Heinle
- Schermer
- South-Western
That’s a pretty impressive list.
Also, a bunch of universities are going to issue Kindle DXes to some of their students this Fall session to try it out -
Arizona State University, Case Western Reserve University, Princeton University, Reed College, and Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia will launch trial programs to make Kindle DX devices available to students this fall. The schools will distribute hundreds of Kindle DX devices to students spread across a broad range of academic disciplines.
Princeton has some interesting details (courtesy this article) -
Under the pilot, the reading materials for three courses due to start in the autumn will be loaded on Kindle DX devices. Participating students and faculty members in the selected courses will receive a free DX that they will be allowed to keep
Internal statistics show that students are not reading digital articles and book selections on their computer screens, but rather downloading and printing the same files again and again, in the course of a semester.
Also, this summer 3 newspapers are trialling Kindle DX with lower price in exchange for a subscription – that’s a great idea. Actually it’s only in areas that have no home delivery of newspapers so its not as good an idea. The newspapers are-
- New York Times.
- Washington Post.
- Boston Globe (which might not be around by the summer).
Meanwhile the press conference is going on and listening to Gizmodo live blog it. However the product page has all the info so not missing the conference much.
Kindle DX lets you flip the orientation, which is really cool. The video at the DX product page shows it -
WideScreen - DX has landscape mode
There is however official Adobe PDF support. Adobe’s note on this -
Amazon has licensed the RM9SDK and has integrated PDF (Portable Document Format) technology into the new Amazon Kindle DX giving users instant access to millions of business and personal documents. The integration of PDF technology allows users to simply email PDF files to their Kindle email address or quickly move them to the device using a USB connection. The Adobe SDK also supports PDF reflow, so that text can automatically adapt to the screen size, allowing users to consume PDF documents with an enhanced reading experience.
Formats supported by the Kindle DX -
Kindle (AZW), PDF, TXT, Audible (formats 4, Audible Enhanced (AAX)), MP3, unprotected MOBI, PRC natively; HTML, DOC, RTF, JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP through conversion.
You can preorder Kindle DX now – it will ship in the summer.
