This is the second part to my early analysis of the new Kindle DX large-format e-book reader. In the first post ("Early analysis of Amazon's Kindle DX: Overview") I discussed the physical and software features of the new device. In the third post, "Early analysis of Amazon's Kindle DX: E-textbooks", I'll talk about how the DX will fit into the educational market.
The new Kindle DX is larger than the Kindle 2 with more than twice the screen resolution.
(Credit: Amazon.com)But here, let's talk about the DX's suitability for reading electronic newspapers.
Newspapers are about text, and there's only a moderate need for interactivity. For each story, the reader views the headline and perhaps skims the opening paragraph, and if it doesn't look interesting, moves on to the next story.
Even with these relatively undemanding requirements, the Kindle DX isn't as good for reading newspapers as a real newspaper. We're all used to the ability to glance over a full newspaper page worth of articles at once. You can't do that with the Kindle.
This issue boils down to the amount of time we spend reading articles vs. the amount of time we spend glancing at headlines and turning pages. Call that the "reading ratio." A real newspaper offers a very high reading ratio even if we're not reading much of the paper, because it takes so little time to flip through the pages looking for articles to read.
On the Kindle DX, the ratio will depend very heavily on how much of the paper we're reading. For those who just read through the whole paper, the ratio can be fairly high, probably 90 percent or better. It'll still be lower than a real newspaper because it takes a certain amount of time to turn the virtual pages of the Kindle, and page turning is much more frequent.
(Demonstration videos seem to show that page turning takes about the same amount of time on the DX as on the earlier Kindles.)
For those who read only a fraction of the stories in the day's paper, the reading ratio of the Kindle DX will be much worse than a real newspaper because the experience will be dominated by page turning. Since most of us can't simply increase the amount of time we spend reading the paper each day, I'm afraid that the Kindle approach to e-news will actually reduce the amount of news we read.
It's also worth comparing the Kindle e-news experience with that of the iPhone and a laptop. These devices have active displays with fast update rates, greatly reducing the page-turning delays. I use The New York Times application on my iPhone pretty regularly (once or twice a week, at least), and it's really quite easy to flick through the day's top stories, which appear on the iPhone with the headline, a thumbnail photo, and usually about half of the lede.
On the other hand, the delay to read the story itself is quite long, since the Times' iPhone software is not designed to pre-load the stories, as the Kindle does. The iPhone takes about 10 seconds to bring up a story once selected, but once it's in, there are no further delays. The rest of the story scrolls past as fast as I want to flick through it.
At home, on my laptop, The New York Times Web site is even faster. It's easy to skim the titles and ledes of about a dozen stories on the main page for each "section," and loading a story takes no more than a second or two. Once loaded, again, there are no further delays.
The Kindle DX simply can't deliver that kind of e-news experience because the screen technology is inherently too slow to support scrolling or fast page-turning.
In fact, it looks like the Kindle DX isn't even taking full advantage of its own capabilities. The newspaper interface is very basic: one wide column of text, not the multiple narrow columns that help us skim through real newspapers. I wonder why?
But again, I think the DX will do an adequate job for people who like to read most of the day's news stories. How much of the market that is, I can't guess, but I suspect it's a higher fraction among older, wealthier customers.
(Now, continue on to "Early analysis of Amazon's Kindle DX: E-textbooks", or return to "Early analysis of Amazon's Kindle DX: Overview".)
This is the third part to my early analysis of the new Kindle DX large-format e-book reader. In the first post ("Early analysis of Amazon's Kindle DX: Overview") I discussed the physical and software features of the new device. In the second post, "Early analysis of Amazon's Kindle DX: E-news", I described the limitations of the DX for news reading.
The textbook market represents an even greater challenge for the Kindle DX. There's a lot of variety among textbooks. Some textbooks will work well enough on the DX's display, but most, I think, will not.
The new Kindle DX is larger than the Kindle 2 with over twice the screen resolution.
(Credit: Amazon.com, Inc.)I think the key issues here are how each textbook is used, and what kind of illustrations are present in it.
Textbooks that are fundamentally like collections of stories, such as those in sociology, history, and literature, will likely be most suitable for use as e-books. These texts are read sequentially, so that the reading ratio (the time spent reading vs. the time spent finding the next thing to read or waiting for the display to update) can be high, and they can usually be written so as not to rely on complex color illustrations. (Though complex color illustrations are still valuable, and the Kindle DX doesn't support them.)
Texts for the natural and formal sciences will not work so well.
A biology textbook without color is almost inconceivable, except that if you have a Kindle, it's pretty easy to see how that works. Just download the sample for the Kindle edition of Steven Daniel Garber's "Biology: A Self-Teaching Guide".
Right up front, you'll get a hint that all may not be well. The e-book includes a disclaimer: "Due to the nature of digital conversion, some of the images included in this e-book may lack the detail and clarity of the originals."
And indeed, that's true. Much of the fine detail that would be visible in a printed copy of this book is lost here. Remember, textbooks are commonly printed on offset presses with more than ten times the linear resolution of a Kindle display.
And even if a reader were willing to zoom in to see the fine detail on an illustration (and if the Kindle DX allows it, which the earlier Kindle models often don't), the lack of color is utterly crippling. Biology textbooks rely on photomicrographs of cells in which subtle color gradations are essential to understanding the cell structure.
Perhaps some of these figures could be replaced by line drawings carefully crafted to communicate the same facts without relying on color, but some photographs are irreplaceable.
And line drawings have their own problems. I downloaded the Kindle sample version of "History of the Ancient World" by Susan Wise Bauer and looked at the book's maps on my Kindle. Some are fine, but many have notations that are virtually illegible at a normal reading distance, to the point where I can be sure that 50% more linear resolution isn't going to help enough.
For math, science, and engineering, I think the Kindle DX will also be inadequate. I remember studying these subjects, and what I remember about using the textbooks is frequently flipping back and forth through the pages to compare new material to old and find the applicable explanations and formulas when answering review questions at the end of each chapter.
The Kindle DX simply doesn't support page flipping. Backing up twenty pages takes two seconds with a paper textbook, but most of a minute on a Kindle.
Amazon has made deals with several major publishers to bring texts to the Kindle DX, and with several major universities to support the DX in some classes next fall. These are encouraging announcements, but these are just experiments, not evidence of the DX's suitability.
I'll be interested to see whether Amazon, its publishing partners, and these universities initially limit themselves to the low-hanging fruit in history and literature classes, or go after some of the more challenging courses.
Ultimately, I don't think any e-book reader is really the right answer for educational use. The better solution is to adapt textbooks and other educational materials such as exams to notebook computers, which can support more types of content (including full-motion video) and provide valuable interactivity.
And the even better answer, in the long run, is to develop systems that are even more tightly focused on education, with long-life batteries, rugged construction, and specific software and hardware features that aren't generally found in laptop PCs. I've been studying this problem for a long time (since I was in college myself!) and if there's interest, I'll go into more detail in a future post.
As expected, Amazon rolled out its new large-screen e-book reader, the Kindle DX. See Caroline McCarthy's coverage of the announcement here on CNET: "Amazon's big-screen Kindle DX makes its debut." I've spent much of the day reviewing the available information, and here are my first thoughts on the announcement.
Inevitably, the DX isn't exactly what I expected when I wrote my predictions earlier this week ("What to expect from Amazon and Apple"), but I got most of the major points right.
The new Kindle DX is larger than the Kindle 2 with over twice the screen resolution.
(Credit: Amazon.com, Inc.)Here are the basic facts:
It's 7.2" wide and 10.4" tall, just a little smaller than I expected. With so many things in our lives adapted to the size of a standard 8.5" x 11" sheet of paper, it seems to me that would have been a better target for the DX. (Internationally, A4 paper serves the same purpose at 8.3 x 11.7 inches, so perhaps 8.3 x 11.0 inches would have been a good compromise.)
The DX's monochrome E Ink display is much smaller than I was hoping for, only 9.7" diagonal. Like the original Kindle, much of the space on the front of the unit is occupied by page-turning buttons and a physical keyboard.
The screen has 1,200 x 824 pixels, about the number on the LCD of a 12" Dell Latitude E4200 laptop, so the Kindle DX's linear resolution is significantly higher than that of most notebook displays. However, it's about 10% lower than that of the 6" E Ink display on the Kindle 2 (150 dpi vs. 167 dpi).
As Amazon says, the DX's display is about 2.5 times larger than the Kindle 2's screen. But that's in square inches. In pixels, it's only 50% taller and 37% wider.
That's a key point, I think, because of the markets Amazon says the DX was developed for: newspapers and textbooks. I'll deal with these topics in two subsequent posts ("Early analysis of Amazon's Kindle DX: E-news" and "Early analysis of Amazon's Kindle DX: E-textbooks").
The Kindle DX does have a few unique advantages over the earlier Kindles. It supports rotation, providing a landscape display mode, a feature long available on Sony's Reader. Also like the Sony Reader, the DX has PDF support. On the Reader, PDF documents support zooming to a certain point, but even when zoomed in all the way in landscape mode, illustrations in PDFs of technical books are often unreadable. I expect the same will be true of the Kindle DX.
Oddly, Amazon isn't retrofitting these features to the Kindle 2. The Kindle 2 may lack the position sensor that makes rotation automatic on the Kindle DX, but it could still allow manual rotation. PDF support should be even easier to add.
Perhaps Amazon is holding these features back from the Kindle 2 to promote sales of the DX, but if so, I think that's extremely short-sighted.
Although it isn't particularly a Kindle DX feature, I'll mention something disappointing that I came across while browsing through Amazon's Kindle pages just now. Since the Kindle was launched, users have been able to email documents in various formats such as Word, HTML, PDF, and JPEG to their Kindles to name@kindle.com, where they go through an Amazon server that converts them, if necessary, into a Kindle-friendly format and downloads them automatically to the user's Kindle.
The fee for this super-convenient conversion and download service was ten cents per document. But now, Amazon charges $0.15 per megabyte, rounded up to the next megabyte. For PDF files and image-rich Word documents that exceed a megabyte in size-- a common situation-- the cost of this convenience has tripled or worse. Fortunately, Amazon still supports the "name@free.kindle.com" method, which results in the converted documents showing up in the user's email, from where they can be manually moved to the Kindle via USB.
I'm surprised that Amazon didn't equip the DX with an improved web browser. As far as I can tell, the DX has the same browser as the Kindle 2. It's still called "experimental," at least. The screen size of the Kindle 2 (800 x 600 pixels) is a little on the small side for effective web browsing, but the Kindle DX's screen is big enough to display almost any web page, especially in landscape mode.
Now, I'll move on to the two new markets for which the Kindle DX was developed. See "Early analysis of Amazon's Kindle DX: E-news" and "Early analysis of Amazon's Kindle DX: E-textbooks".
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