New Graphite DX alongside Older White DX This photo is from the Amazon's Customer Images area and is taken by D. Meador. Here's a link to the specific image which is 130k in size. I had to make it smaller for the blog and for the loading time of the Kindle Edition of this blog. It's a good illustration of the subtle differences in background lightness being more evident when you can see where the lighter aspects come through in a much more intense way, as in the white that you can see within the dark area of the...

Amazon Kindle Review has just published this guide, along with a fair number of pictures. According to them: Kindle DX 2 PDF support includes - Search the PDF. Add bookmarks. Go to a particular Page. Click ‘Go To’ from the Menu, then enter Page Number and click on ‘Page’. Zoom – There is support for ‘Fit to Page’, ‘Original Size’ and zooming to 150%, 200%, and 300%. Zoom is preserved as you flip through the pages (thankfully). Pan around when you have zoomed a PDF. There are little guides at the bottom and right side that show where you are in the PDF page. PDFs...

Jakob Nielsen, the Web usability guru, is a hero of mine in many ways. Bow toward Fremont, California, or wherever he works these days, the next time a struggling e-newspaper iinflicts a horrid full-page ad on you with “Skip this” in tiny type. Those are hate crimes against readers: the stuff Nielsen preaches against. Kudos to him! Nielsen’s latest e-book-related study, however---comparing reading speeds for the iPad, the Kindle and paper publications---means little in the long term. He seems to imply as much when he says the results are “promising for the future of e-readers and tablet computers,” even though the paper...

Amazon finally seems to have noticed that its $489 Kindle DX is still overpriced compared to the iPad. It is coming out with a new model, with 50% improved contrast and a graphite rather than white body. The 9.7” e-ink display and 3G wireless remain otherwise the same, but the price is falling $110 to $379. The new Kindle DX will ship July 7th, but Amazon is taking pre-orders now. If you were considering buying one of those $350 DX refurbs we mentioned earlier, you might want to think again....

Amazon Kindle Review is reporting that the DX can be had for $249, but I just checked and its being listed at $350 (actually $349.99). Still a pretty good deal considering the list price. Here's the Amazon link....

Got the following email from Bruce Wilson: A short lab test in the July 2010 issue. I paraphrase and quote: Opening line: "Amazon's Kindle e-readers are still the best choice for most consumers." "In our comprehensive tests, the Kindle, $260, and its supersized sibling, the Kindle [DX], $490, had crisper, more readable type than any other e-reader in the Ratings and better than the iPad's (see sidebar)." The Ratings: 6- to 7-inch screens: 63 Kindle 60 Sony Reader Daily edition 56 Sony Reader Daily Touch 52 Nook 51 BeBook Neo 8- to 10-inch screen: 65 Kindle [DX] 49 iRex DR 800SG For text readability, both Kindles are rated above average. All others are average....

Back in March, we covered the University of Virginia Darden School of Business’s experiments with trying out the Kindle DX to see how well it could replace textbooks. At the time, the preliminary results suggested that most students found it simply didn’t work. Now, with the trial almost over, Darden has posted a detailed article summing up the results. Surveyed at mid-term on how satisfied they were with the Kindle, the students concluded that the device was simply too slow and clunky at moving between pages to keep up in the fast-paced classroom environment—but almost all the 62...

Wired’s “Gadget Lab” blog has a report on colleges planning to hand out iPads to their student bodies. I’ve mentioned Seton Hill before, but this article also mentions George Fox University and Abilene Christian University. Abilene Christian has already had some success with a pilot program of issuing iPhones to all its students. George Fox was less successful with an iPod Touch program because students didn’t bring them to the classrooms, but the iPad is expected to change that. Bill Rankin, a professor of medieval studies at Abilene Christian, called the iPhone program...

The Financial Times reports on the experience of University of Virginia students in the Darden School of Business, who were issued Kindle DXes as part of a pilot program to see whether they could successfully replace paper textbooks. (Note: The Financial Times has a paywall; if you cannot view the article, search “No substitute for a paper read” in Google News.) It turns out that for most students, the answer is “no”: although most agree they make great personal reading devices, almost 3/4 of the 63 students participating in the project said they would not recommend the device...

Wonpyo Yun, a reporter for the Daily Princetonian, has the scoop on an official Princeton University announcement of the results from the Kindle DX pilot project on which the Ivy League school partnered with Amazon last semester. Yun's report suggests that the New Jersey university's report will lead with the positive by touting cost savings and the fact that use of the DX "reduced the amount of paper students printed for their respective classes by nearly 50 percent." But it also makes clear that the Kindle DX pilot project was something less than a love fest. (Update: here's a link to the...

CNet reports that a Millward Brown study shows that Amazon ranks as the most trusted and recommended brand in the United States. It’s not terribly surprising; When you have a company that operates smoothly enough that most people not directly affected by them are willing to overlook those times when it accidentally or intentionally delists books or removes them from user devices, it has to be doing something right. TechFlash reports that Microsoft and Amazon have signed a cross-patent-licensing agreement, where each company gains the rights to use the other’s patent portfolio. The deal indemnifies Amazon against a...

The Kindle Reader says: Once you've purchased an Amazon Kindle e-book reader, the wonderful world of public domain, Creative Commons and free e-book promotions opens up to you. This regular Kindle Reader feature points you to a few of the most interesting new free (or very cheap) e-books available for download from the web. Jan 27 Free e-book selections for this week include a fan fiction treat for Harry Potter fans, a Jules Verne adventure tale, two classic mysteries, science fiction by Philip José Farmer and Michael Graeme, a novel of time travel back to 1940s Britain and - for history buffs -...