Amazon Kindle DX Details Revealed 312
theodp writes with news that details for the Kindle DX are now available. "Specs-wise, the big changes are a larger 9.7-inch screen that rotates to landscape display, a PDF reader, and more storage space. The Kindle DX carries a $489 price tag (compared to the $359 Kindle 2)." Engadget has a series of pictures from Jeff Bezos' presentation, and the Amazon product information page has further details and a video. According to the press release, Amazon has worked out a deal with The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and The Washington Post to "offer the Kindle DX at a reduced price to readers who live in areas where home-delivery is not available."
Re:Good Next Step (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:as long as books are cheap (Score:5, Interesting)
Textbooks are expensive only in small part due to the hardcover / high quality paper they're printed on. The IP of the authors is what costs the most money.
Most likely the Kindle + e-versions of textbooks will be only slightly cheaper than paper textbooks. To really see the savings of the kindle you have to look deeper. Pens, paper, notebooks used to write notes on will be in some large part replaced by the annotation capabilities of the Kindle. Mobile internet for life is also something that people seem to underestimate. Furthermore, reducing paper waste seems to me by far the biggest cost reduction. It's just not one that we typically factor in when we're sliding our credit card.
Here's to a better world and better Kindles to come.
Re:Significant advantages to students: (Score:3, Interesting)
No, I don't think "publishers did it for the students."
That is not the same, however, as saying "students might want it."
If you think "the index" is the same as "the search button," you haven't used either recently. The index names a few headwords chosen by editors and an indexer. 95% of the other words in a book don't turn up in it. It references the most critical pages, not necessarily all pages that refer to the headword in question. It typically omits statistics, names and organizations, and sources, which you often don't get in a textbook in easily reference form since most undergrad textbooks include no footnotes or endnotes.
Search is HUGE for a studying undergrad, especially during junior and sophomore years when the exams are getting harder and knowing the books inside and out more critical.
Perhaps this is not the case in computer science or mathematics, but anywhere across the arts, humanities, social sciences, history, area studies, management and policy, etc., it will be more than a boon.
I used my little Kindle 1.0 to study for a comprehensive Ph.D. written examination for just that reason; I accumulated 20-30 reference works and then could search for names and critical phrases across the entire contents of my kindle and save those search results for easy recall.
And the way that Kindle saves the search results, it aggregates the surrounding sentences into lists:
Result 1: From Book Title: Surrounding context and keywords here.
Result 2: From Book Title: Surrounding context and keywords here.
etc.
And you can click on each one if you want more. The end result was that I could study using just my "saved searches" referencing dozens of books at once, without having to flip through them endlessly and stick paperclips and post-it notes in each volume on "important pages."
The massive juxtaposition of directly relevant paragraphs as "you created 'em" pages that were directly on point for me was amazing.
I was the only person in some years to pass with honors, after several faculty and other students had made fun of me for studying on my Kindle.
Re:Significant advantages to students: (Score:3, Interesting)
You must not be in a professional field. We keep our books as references, often for out entire careers. I still use two or three of my texts - from 20 years ago - on a weekly basis (okay, maybe monthly). It's hard to loan your kindle to someone to look something up, but very easy to do so with a single textbook.
Kindle is an entertainment device, not a business one (not yet, at least). And I'm okay saying that a lot of non-technical (and some technical) classes in College are merely entertainment.
Hierarchical purchasing and the netbook threat (Score:3, Interesting)
I suspect that text books are expensive in part because of the hierarchical purchasing structure that amplifies success and failure. It's like the movie industry where in any given year there's only enough theater space, interest and mind share so you have a few collosal winners and a lot of losers that still cost you money.
As for kindle, I think it is going to get bracketed by apple and die. Let me first say the big hope here is the subscription model. It's perfect for the NYtimes which is best read old school on large paper. (if you don't beleive me, try buying a copy at starbucks and see if you don't find it more satisfying and leisurely to read that way even though in theory the content is the same as the web.)
Anyhow, the point is given a choice of carrying a kindle plus some a netbook or just a net book and I suspect the netbook wins if it's added features make it compelling enough to outweigh the e-ink legibility advantage.
Subsidize this netbook with a verizon data-only contract and you have ubiquitous on-the go computing at an affordable price. The key thing here is that both the kindle and the netbook want a cell phone connection. But the Kindle is going to seek subsidy from the content providers whereas the netbook is going to seek subsidy from the deeper pockets of the cell phone providers.
Right now no one has a netbook that is sufficiently compelling, and kindle's price range puts in mainly in the hands of people who are not price sensitive or need to worry about choosing between two devices.
But what is going to kill the kindle I think is bracketing by apple. When apple comes out with a high performance netbook it will be something about the same size but with a lot more capability. I expect it will even have game capability. what really set the iPhone apart from all the previous pda-smartphones was it's performance. it has an integrated conformal mattery that I think gives them enough extra juice in a small space to power a much more capable device and they gave it a familiar OS and stack underneath that can run real applications. I suspect apples purchase of freescale and embrace of Nivida chips is aimed squarely at small devices with higher performance.
kindle won't be able to compete against a device like that.
Re:as long as books are cheap (Score:3, Interesting)
The IP of the authors is what costs the most money.
close, but wrong, between $.20 to $1.06 goes to the author, $3-$6 is the printing cost: To calculate the royalty you earn per book sold you multiply five percent, or .05, times $20. The result equals $1. So that's the royalty you earn for every book the publisher sells. [buzzle.com]
the Publisher eats the majority of the remaining profit. Straight to ebook should remove that overhead and I think reduce the cost by at least 60%.
True and interesting. (Score:3, Interesting)
That is indeed a good question. I know that my wife doesn't get mileage out of the Kindle like I do because she has a vast library in Polish, which Kindle doesn't support.
I'd love to see them do something more international-friendly in a standards-compliant way.
Re:Before the FUD creeps in again: (Score:2, Interesting)
you are wrong :)
See http://igorsk.blogspot.com/ [blogspot.com]
Igorsk is one who's done some great work on both the Sony Reader and Kindle.
At the very least, his work allows Cyrillic books to be read, which is not supported natively. Not sure if there are other applications.
Re:Good Next Step (Score:3, Interesting)
Books with graphics get to be rather large. Books with markup tend to get rather large as well.
And just like MP3 players, you want to carry your whole collection around with you... 3GB is a lot until you start to really use the device, and then it's not enough.
Re:as long as books are cheap (Score:3, Interesting)
Publishers have all sorts of schemes to prevent this from working in practice. Was either of your sons required to buy "Freshman Intro Text, 19th Edition"? Or do any of those texts have an online component?
God I hate textbook publishers. Graduate texts are much more sane, thankfully.
txtr reader (Score:2, Interesting)
The Kindle looks nice and it has a high resolution (1200x824). But I am looking forward to upcoming products such as the txtr reader [txtr.com]: Linux-based, hackable, and proper support of DRM-free formats.
Re:If Amazon... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:as long as books are cheap (Score:3, Interesting)
You are focused too much on the supply side; the reason textbooks are expensive has little to do with the cost (either of materials or the IP making up the content) and much to do with the fact that price is not a significant factor in purchase decisions -- they aren't assigned, for the most part, based on a cost:value analysis, and once they are assigned, there generally is no acceptable substitute. Books that are sometimes incidentally used as textbooks whose material quality and IP is no less expensive than other textbooks, but which are also marketed to a wider audience and thus have to be priced to sell to people who have a choice about whether or not to buy them, are often substantially less expensive than textbooks that are marketed only as textbooks.
Re:as long as books are cheap (Score:3, Interesting)
The goal of the Open Slate Project [openslate.net] is to develope an open-source Kindle-like, Newton-like slate computer, and, to go with it, Chalk Dust [openslate.net] educational software and courseware. Chalk Dust is intended to replace textbooks beginning at the high school level (9th - 12th grade), then expand to include college and primary school.