I’m wondering– most PDFs I own and read are letter-sized or A4 sized. I wonder how they would display on the DX screen.

1. To those who think it is more economical to download a book onto their pc or laptop rather than purchase a kindle: You obviously don’t read much, and apparently you have never stared at a computer screen for extended periods of time. The money you save by reading your book on your computer will not cover the anguish of a migraine that follows from squinting at a computer screen for hours on end.

The Kindle 2 and DX are easy on the eyes. A computer screen is strain on the eyes.

2. To those that think that carrying one more gadget in your bag is excess: Have you ever carried a full day worth of college level course textbooks with you in one bag?

The potential to carry 1500 to 3500 books around in a small contained unit is enormous. I am in the military and in college. I have deployed for extended periods of time. I wish I did not have to lug around 15 books with me whenever I got shipped out, only to be forced to leave those plus the extra books that I had shipped over because they exceeded my weight allowance for redeployment back to the U.S.

Think of the potential of outfitting a start-up school in, say, Afghanistan with a digital library! I foresee a future where Kindle will one day be able to convert automatically from one language to another at the push of a button to aide with barriers of communication between student and teacher.

If you are like me and you have limited space to store your favorite books, then Kindle can be a godsend.

The current capabilities of the Kindle are enormous, but the potential of the Kindle is infinite.

3. To those that think the price is too high: Well, I do agree with that–to an extent. However, the law of supply and demand, and the inevitable high entry price of new technology based products will hopefully be followed by lower prices in the future.

In theory, with the advent of the Kindle, the outrageous price of textbooks should decline when they are formatted for digital readers. Constantly keeping textbooks updated is a heavy burden pushed onto the consumer in the form of ever increasing publishing costs. This can be mitigated with a digital based system that is easily updated.

I would like to see a day when you can literally rent books from a library database for a limited time, at a minimal cost. But, for now, the price is what it is. No matter how you cut it, the library is the most cost effective source for reading out there.

4. If you are like me and you have a large dictionary the size of two phone books in your room and a smaller one that you carry with you at all times, then the Kindles’ ability to allow the user to highlight and search a vaguely understood or completly new word is awesome!

I am an active reader, so I can never continue my reading if I do not fully understand a word, or I can’t derive the meaning from the context of the sentence.

ENDSTATE: I don’t actually own a Kindle, yet :) , but, with a little luck, I will be able to afford one in the near future (before my next deployment). Until then, I can be found at my local library almost every week.

Kindle is a great use for technology. It might even be “cool” enough to convince kids to pick one up and actually benefit from technology rather than burn their brains out playing video games, or become victims of some sort while perusing the internet, or get caught up in prebubescent pedantry while “sex texting” their grade school crush.

Keep the critiques coming, for that is the only way Kindle will be improved, but the uninformed and baseless bashing is not needed.

When I plug the DX into the PC, it allows me to
create subdirs and copy files into subdirs.

When I use the DX to browse; it collapses the
subdirs and their respective contents into a single
(flat) list. WTF?

Why does the PDF reader lack support for embedded
bookmarks?

I wish someone like Casio would wade into this market with a really cheap tacky reader for the school kids.

Simple – much better screen _for reading_ (I find it easier on the eyes than most books), much better battery life, and I don’t need to be a body-builder to hold it up. My reader goes everywhere I do.

It’s like asking me why I own a proper corkscrew when my Swiss Army knife can open bottles.

Look at Apple. They were selling DRMed music, i did not hear anyone complain? Amazon broke the shackles by providing DRM free music. How? Cause the production companies were being dictated by Apple on what price they would get for the songs sold. So they went with Amazon to create an alternative to Apple and break the monopoly and the arm twisting.

Amazon would have loved to do the same here but the content providers need to agree.

Next time you go buy a book, write a mail to the publishers that you want the book in a DRM free e-book format. Don’t blame Amazon for something they have no control over.

This is just the latest round of format wars where corporations tie content to proprietary formats to proprietary display technologies and single-point distribution sources. Remember when we had to buy CDs because the record industry wanted us to believe that the music was permanently embedded in them? Have you notived how beloved they are today because of it? And an EBook is mostly a text file!

I’ve been reading Richard Geller’s beautiful Adobe AIR EBooks from http://www.aSiteAboutSomething.com on my laptop. They’re almost like reading a physical book, were developed with web technologies available to anyone, and didn’t require approval or markup by anybody’s app store.

Kindle? Why?