Elliott C. Back: Internet & Technology

When Apple released the Macbooks for the first time, people speculated that the white finish would pick up dirt over time, discoloring. Now that the Kindle 2’s are out, the race is on to see how dirty they get, how fast. So far, mine has picked minor amounts of cleanable grime, and retained its white coloration. The back has picked up some scratches, deep into the aluminum. But, the e-ink screen so far is flawless, which in the Kindle ebook reader, is all that matters.

Amazon’s latest Kindle is the just-announced bigger version of the Kindle2, the
Kindle DX. With 9.7″ of screen real estate, compared to the Kindle 2’s 6″, it theoretically provides a better reading experience for large-format publications, primarily textbooks, newspapers, and magazines. You can pre-order it today for $489, $130 more than the regular Kindle2.

Other advantages of the Kindle DX over the Kindle 2 include 3.3Gb of Storage for 3,500 books, rotation settings for orienting it in different reading positions, and most usefully, native PDF support. That last one is the only thing I really care about–although I’ve heard that the larger screen size will make refreshes slower. And, what about international support, faster refreshes, or color e-ink?

Still, for Amazon, for every 100 hard copies sold, an additional 35 Kindle editions are being sold, which is incredible growth. For more opinions, try searching Twitter for “Kindle DX”!

For a look at the new Kindle2 unboxed, a review of the awesome device itself, or a list of pros and cons, you’ll have to look elsewhere. For what it’s worth, I just got my Kindle2, and I think it’s better than actual books.

One often overlooked feature is Amazon’s Kindle PDF/Microsoft Word .doc to AWZ (kindle format) conversion service. For just $.10 an attachment, they will convert files for you into Kindle format, and transmit them wirelessly to your device! A question you might ask is how does the converted file look, and is it readable?

First, the new file is transmitted and named exactly as the attachment is named. The “author” field is your email address, so you can quickly distinguish the converted pdf from your purchases on the Amazon Kindle store.

The conversion doesn’t know about tables of contents, footnotes, copyright statements, prefaces, or any other book convention. It simply reads in the file you gave it, and spits it out onto your Kindle in the same format. So, the indentation may be screwy, and there may not be any chapters or other marks–it will read as a single continuous chunk of text. That said, it is legible and works, although the experience is somewhat degraded from what you’d buy in the Kindle store.

You can also get text (as above) which came from a page marking randomly inserted into the paragraph flow. Converting PDFs is definitely not glitch free, but at least it only costs you $.10 a try!