You know, this is probably a really ridiculous gripe, but that silvery plastic look makes the new Kindles look cheap. It reminds me of the cheap silver plastic they use for "As seen on TV" products. I much preferred the slate gray and white colors of the Kindle Keyboard.
Does anyone use the Kindle for technical books? If so, how does it fare? For the $79/$99 it's not a big price to pay, but I have 10s, if not 100s of PDFs that I would like to keep and read (reading on the iPad isn't working out for me).
Any thoughts?
Update: Just saw fribblerz's comment about the DX. But I am still curious about the other Kindles.
You basically need a DX for PDF's. The smaller screen requires more zooming and navigating, which is a pain due to the performance lag.
Of course, this can be avoided if they are not PDF out of neccesity. If the book is all text, not heavily formatted, and you just have it in PDF for convienience, look into getting an eBook copy.
Note: I use a 2nd gen Kindle. The newer models might be a little snappier.
This is not a problem of the device, though. The scrolling and zooming makes sense as (most) PDFs use A4 page format and PDF cannot be reflowed to other screen sizes, which epub etc can. Unless you generate a PDF with smaller pages somehow, it isn't even possible to display it on a small screen with all the details without zooming/panning.
I love my Kindle, but I think it's awful for anything with graphics, tables, code, etc. Basically: if it's not free-flowing text you're not going to enjoy it on an e-ink Kindle, imo.
Second that code is awful (it wraps funny, even in landscape mode). But . . . I hate buying dead tree books that expire in two versions. Admittedly not a huge concern, but still.
I actually read PDFs pretty frequently on my Kindle. I usually set it to landscape mode.
I used briss to convert some big pdf books (On Lisp and I think a free version of SICP) so they would be a little more readable. briss does some clipping of the margins.
I love tech books in print form, but I prefer a tech book I can drop on the kindle now. The raw convenience of the kindle wins out for me.
If the DX gets cheap, I may be forced to grab one. I won't be upgrading to the new color device.
I have a Kindle 3. It's fantastic for fiction/nonfiction/Instapaper. Technical papers are my one major gripe. It's essentially hit or miss, but mostly miss.
I've found that most technical PDF papers are non-trivial to convert to Kindle. It would be one thing if they were scaled down to a format that only required vertical scrolling, but as it stands unless the author/publisher makes an effort, most technical PDFs require horizontal and vertical scrolling. Certainly possible, but hardly convenient.
I had posted a similar comment earlier today about this.
I love the keyboard for note taking when reading technical books on the kindle. That way I can come back months or years later and just read my notes to refresh my memory.
The hi-lighting option is also great for this. It's like instant cliff's notes.
if you don't want to read the book then you can just search amazon for the hi-lights that people have made public for the book and you've got your cliff's notes without having to read the text yourself:)
I'm really looking forward to something like a cheaper variant of DX to come along.
Technical books don't render well on 6 inch screen and I can't get myself to shell out a notebook's price for current DX.
As someone that's been on the Kindle since the 1st gen, I love the march to something cheap and light/small enough to be held in one hand.
It's just a shame that there's no text-to-speech, which would be really killer on this, the lightest model in the lineup. I find TTS really useful, especially for non-fiction, essays and news (conveying the nuances of fiction, particularly dialogue, can be awkward with TTS). I think the feature's been buried by way of being awkwardly placed in the text-size menu of previous Kindles. I'd say %90 of Kindle owners I talk to have never used it or don't know the functionality is even there.
At the very least, I hope Amazon puts it in their iOS/Android apps.
Many publishers don't allow their books to use the TTS feature. Possibly because they fear that it would could into their audio-book market. Amazon may have decided that it's a feature that's too infrequently used to justify the cost.
Same price as a Prime membership. How long 'til they say "aw shucks, we'll just give every Prime member one"? Maybe fulfilling the theorized "free Kindle by November '11" prediction? (Price drops vs. dates graph is near straight-line to there.)
Sure ultimately it was the publisher's decision to go to the agency model but if Apple and Amazon held firm it would have been a win for the consumer. Apple decided to take a swipe at one of its competitors which in the end hurt consumers by allowing for ebooks to be priced artificially.
eBook prices were artificial to begin with. Amazon was known to take a loss when necessary to set the price ceiling at $9.99, which (as you can imagine) would hurt competitors who couldn't absorb losses like that.
Not until we stop paying for DRM-encumbered content. Kindles and Nooks are subsidized by the sale of DRM encumbered goods. If we buy them and use only DRM-free content, we will exert pressure on Amazon and Barnes and Noble to drop DRM on books (or, at least, offer content in non-DRM-encumbered forms) and thus, generate the same pressure to others who require DRM.
OK, thanks for that, I was thinking that it was the usual small markets pay more thing. Osbourne effect: I've actually been putting off a kindle purchase until the pad was launched as I knew there would be a cheaper electronic ink reader after the pad.
Still another £20 less than it was at retail last week.
Though my other half (who I bought a K3 for then) thinks losing the keyboard basically breaks its search function and is happy she got the one she has.
personally I don't like it...the current kindle feels too small and a bit uncomfortable to read because of that, I'd imagine with the new one flipping pages is going to be even more anoying
