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Kindle DX will ship with Adobe’s PDF capabilities—but not ePub: Time for academic community to speak up!
May 6, 2009 | 11:28 am
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By David Rothman
The Kindle DX will ship with Adobe PDF capabilities—but not, alas, with ePub ones. I hope that the academic community, a major target of the new product, will speak up and demand that Amazon stop depriving customers of ePub, the industry standard. Announcement below is from Adobe’s Nick Bogaty. – D.R.
I have included a brief update from the Digital Publishing Group at Adobe detailing four new device licensees of the Adobe Reader Mobile 9 Software Development Kit (RM9SDK): Amazon (Kindle DX), Neolux Corporation (Nuutbook), Netronix and Tianjin Jinke Electronics.
Amazon has licensed the RM9SDK and has integrated PDF (Portable Document Format) technology into the new Amazon Kindle DX giving users instant access to millions of business and personal documents. The integration of PDF technology allows users to simply email PDF files to their Kindle email address or quickly move them to the device using a USB connection. The Adobe SDK also supports PDF reflow, so that text can automatically adapt to the screen size, allowing users to consume PDF documents with an enhanced reading experience.
The Adobe Reader Mobile SDK has been licensed by leading device makers worldwide including Bookeen, iRex Technologies, Lexcycle, Plastic Logic, Polymer Vision Ltd, SONY Electronics, Spring Design and others.
Adobe Reader Mobile SDK supports reflowable PDF technology and the EPUB file format, a new eBook standard with broad support from the publishing industry. The Adobe software engine also offers support for Adobe Content Server 4, Adobe’s popular content protection technology that allows publishers to rely on the copy protection of eBooks and other digital publications. For more information visit http://www.adobe.com/devnet/readermobile.
Please note that Amazon’s integration of the RM9SDK into the Amazon Kindle DX only includes PDF support and not support for EPUB or Adobe Content Server 4. [So no Adobe DRM, apparently. – D.R.] However, we are encouraged that this is a first step toward open file formats and interoperability for the device.
Please let me know if you have any specific feedback or questions. I will keep you up-to-date occasionally on very important releases related to Adobe’s digital publishing products. If you would prefer not to receive these emails, please let me know and I’ll take you off of my personal contact list.
Related: TeleRead link to Kindle DX
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Comments:
Does this mean text-to-speech may not be available for PDFs? I would guess the textbook publishers would be providing PDF, so if that’s the case, probably no read-aloud. But, could be wrong…
According to businessinsider’s report on the Kindle dx launch kindle editions make up 35% of a book’s sales when it is available in both print and kindle versions. That seems like a very important fact to me.
Greg
…
Kindle sales are now 35% of book sales when Kindle editions are available. Huge jump in Feb when Kindle 2 went on sale.
http://www.businessinsider.com/henry-blodget-kindle-sales-now-a-shocking-35-of-book-sales-when-kindle-version-available-2009-5
On his blog (http://blogs.adobe.com/billmccoy/2009/05/amazon_others_l.html), Adobe’s Bill McCoy repeats much of Nick’s message, and adds [what are hopefully] his own views: ‘I find the new large-screen form factor attractive, but as a consumer, I don’t like products that lock me in to a closed architecture. On that basis, I’m afraid I can’t yet recommend the Kindle family, since the commercial eBook support is limited to Amazon’s proprietary format and DRM’.
Tanslating Adobe’s McCoy:
“We can’t recommend Amazon’s proprietary drm format until they pay us for using *our* proprietary drm format.”
Pot, meet kettle.
Hypocrites!
As Felix says – hypocrites.
First – Adobe only reluctantly allowed pdf to become a (mostly) open file format.
Second – Adobe is a big supporter/promoter of DRM yet McCoy has the temerity to chastise Amazon for supplying a device that allows folks to view text files in many formats only ONE of which has DRM.
His statement about the Kindle locking him into a closed architecture is just nonsensical.
If you watch the video that Amazon has posted on the Kindle DX webpage, you may wonder where the beautiful campus scene was filmed. It’s The Quad at the University of Washington campus a few miles from Amazon’s headquarters. That’s how it looks for a week or so each spring as the Japanese cherry trees blossom. You can find some pictures I shot there on April 9 at:
http://inklingbooks.com/Kindle/Kindle.html
And no, I don’t remember seeing a camera team, so I didn’t get a chance to see the Kindle DX in advance. So many people show up to take pictures when the trees blossom, that few probably noticed what Amazon was doing.
I’m surprised that there is no mention of the use of a flexible screen.
Breakage on smaller 6″ screens is somewhat common. I’ve had one break myself — it was not a Kindle, but it was an eInk device. From the reports I had read, others who were considering large screen devices were holding out for flexible displays. The flexibility was solely to provide more robust screens, not so they screens could actually bend.
However, I would think that Amazon would be highlighting this feature if it existed and they are not. So, I would be really cautious about purchasing one of these until we find out about screen resilience.
The kindle DX weighs 18+ ounces: no question it uses a glass substrate.
I’m perplexed, perhaps I’m missing something. Why should the academic community speak up about ePub? Having managed academic digital libraries for 15 years, it was my experience that the dominant electronic format of scholarly publications is PDF. Faculty and students have institutional access to tens of thousands of scholarly articles in PDF.
The larger screen Kindle with support for PDF should be extremely attractive for those who have been sitting on the fence about e-reading devices. And with the larger screen, reflow really becomes much less of an issue. And for all those people who DO want to read PDF then reflow on a large screen is not an issue.
While I do appreciate the value of an open format like ePub on smaller, portable devices, I don’t understand the call for academia to speak up for ePub.
this will be a great device to read all the pirated stuff that one can find online…
will be interesting to see how the symbiosis works
Kindle triggers more piracy efforts which in turn help sell more Kindles
Looks to me that ePub can go down the toilet.
SONY is nowhere to compete and there is no other notable device (or software) that supports it.
Will be interesting to see if Apple really releases a large-screen-iPod-netbook-whatever how will that compete against Kindle…
Also IMHO the price has to come down
The PDF viewer is incredibly basic, I don’t know why they needed Adobe Digital Editions SDK. All the PDF viewer does is clip the margins in portrait mode and clip the margins with continuous view in landscape mode (i.e. parts of two pages could be on the screen at once in landscape).
This isn’t a dig against the DX. Amazon could be correct that this is all you need on a ~10″ screen. Normally there would also be a mode optimized for 2 column documents though.
What is strange is no support for device wide PDF search (as there is for MOBI and Amazon ebooks). PDF to text widely available, and this is needed for within document search (which it has for PDFs and all other document types). The problem may be specifying locations accurately, because the DX also lacks note taking within PDFs.
How many audio books will the DX store? How long will it take to transfer an average audio book? Has Amazon worked out the problem of allowing users to transfer purchases/subscriptions from a K1 or K2 to the DX without having to repurchase everything?
I just gotta say I love my kindle and the cheap books.
My taste is a bit rough but I enjoyed “The Misogynist” by Emily Downs.
It can be a bit vulgar at times. Be warned. But it’s cheap.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Misogynist/dp/B001V5J4VO/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1246301307&sr=1-2
She is the bestselling author of “Lisa Loves Girls”
http://www.amazon.com/Lisa-Loves-Girls-ebook/dp/B002EZZJ4Q/ref=sr_1_7?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1246298800&sr=1-7
2 books for under 2 bucks. THe kindle will own publishing.
I have a Kindle DX and use the PDF feature. I am disappointed in the reading experience because for the PDFs I have transferred over, there is no ability to increase the font size. Most disappointing is the inability to use Adobe Portfolios with the Kindle. I had hoped to use portfolios to organize may many PDFs — alas, this is not available on the DX. Any ideas how to get Amazon to include portfolios on the DX?
So is it possible to scan a book and put it on the Kindle2? Could you use the text-to-speech option in any way when doing this? Do e-books go on just like kindle books? I am planning on putting a lot of school books on a kindle 2 and realized how much better I absorb the material if I read along with text-to-speech. I REALLY hope there is a way to do this!! Any advice? Also, is it way better to put textbooks on the kindle dx? I really prefer the feel of the kindle 2, but also would like to be able to highlight and take notes on my books, scanned (pdf?) or otherwise.
612Lindsay,
For this kind of help I would recommend you go to the Mobileread.com forums. Check out the following message board: http://www.mobileread.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=140
The approach you propose is possible, but it seems like a lot of work to me. Also, I would guess that the more you textbook has pure text the better it would work. The more diagrams and graphics the more problems you may have with text to speech making sense.
I agree with Jeff: As the academic community is already using PDFs for much of its present and legacy uses, there’s not much reason for them to demand ePub. Only a dedicated push to convert all textbooks to electronic formats would warrant adding a format to the Kindle… and in fact, textbooks could render fine in PDF, so again, the new format isn’t that necessary to them.
Of course, PDFs need to be tagged for reflowing to be fully useful and easy to access, and a lot of legacy material (not to mention most new material) is not being tagged. Adobe needs to push the tagging feature, making it the default instead of the option on all PDF generation software, for PDFs to be fully useful as e-books.
At any rate, I wouldn’t want to see the Kindle coupled with the academic community anyway. Better to produce formats that can be read on any devices, not just one or two. Let academics demand devices that read ePub now, and leave the Kindle out of it.
The main reason I bought the Kindle 2 was to read academic articles in .pdf. Academic and library books are in epub, so it is a shame they are not available for Kindle, but I have enough .pdfs to read as it is.
To resize the text of a .pdf on Kindle, first email the .pdf file to Amazon with ‘convert’ in the subject. Amazon will email it back to you in the Kindle file format for free. Then you transfer the new file to the Kindle via USB. This means the text can be resized for easier reading.