Kindle DX Coming To Your Virtual Bookshelf Soon
I first got my hands on the Kindle last autumn when a friend demonstrated how it works, and I’ll have to say it was rather impressive. In case you don’t know, the Kindle is a product offered by Amazon.com which allows you to read thousands of titles of books on a portable, lightweight electronic device any time.
The Kindle, which is an e-book reader, displays text and photos in high-resolution black and white using the E Ink technology first introduced by Sony. You can view a single page of a book that you download from the Amazon.com store indefinitely, as the device uses power only when a page is “turned” by using buttons on its edges. The size of the Kindle is about as large as a paperback book.
Now, Amazon.com is taking things further by introducing a larger, more advantageous device called the Kindle DX. With the Kindle DX, which is only a 1/3 of an inch wide, you’ll be able to more effectively read newspapers on his 9.7 inch screen. And when you hold the device horizontally the text will rotate so that you can read it in widescreen format. Both photos and text appear crystal clear, even when zooming in.
Amazon.com has 275,000 e-books available for downloading to the Kindle, which is performed wirelessly with no fees and no connection to a computer needed. There’s room for up to 3,500 e-books, which is truly amazing. The company claims that downloads take only 60 seconds, assuming you are within range of the Sprint 3G wireless network. There will also be support for subscriptions to newspapers’37 to start with for a subscription cost of $10 per month.
The New York Times has more information about the types of books that will be offered:
Amazon said it had reached agreements with three major textbook publishers to make their books available in the Kindle store: Pearson Education, Cengage Learning and Wiley Higher Education. It said six colleges and universities “Pace, Arizona State, Case Western Reserve, Princeton, Reed College and the University of Virginia” would begin testing the device with students later this year.
Magazine subscriptions to Time, The New Yorker, Newsweek, The Atlantic and numerous others are also available.
The Kindle DX is charged by a power adapter that plugs into the built-in USB miniport. If you leave the wireless connection on continuously the Kindle will work for four days on a single charge, but if wireless is switched off you can use it for up to two weeks.
To top it all off, the Kindle DX can view PDF files with its built-in reader. It also supports displaying plain text, HTML, RTF, DOC, DOCX, JPEG, GIF, PNG and BMP files. A dictionary is preinstalled so you can look up words on-the-fly while reading. Oh, I almost forgot to mention that you can surf the Internet and even listen to your MP3s while you read as well.
I’m pretty sure that the Kindle DX will certainly prove to be a revolutionary device. But you’re going to pay a high price for innovation, try $489. This Kindle won’t be available until this summer, but you can always pre-order one on Amazon.com.
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