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TheHotSpring.com :: The Amazon Kindle DX is a beautiful device. Its design is user-friendly, intuitive and cohesive. It is clean-edged, minimal and thinner than many major magazines. Its format size is comfortable and makes tactile sense; it feels like something you hold in order to read, giving it a useful aesthetic kinship to books or magazines, a vast improvement on smaller e-reading devices. It is, in point of fact, far more comfortable than planting yourself in front of a computer monitor to read large amounts of text.

One of the first things to praise about it is its efficient wireless download process. At no charge to the user, Kindle DX allows for wireless connection to the Kindle Store and immediate wireless download, from any location, without requiring any connection-login or wifi network. In fact, Amazon registers the device for the end user before sending it out, so it can be opened and used, straight out of the box, literally within seconds.

Its black-and-white e-paper monitor allows for extremely efficient battery usage. It need not be put to sleep or turned off, as the device uses no energy to show what is on the screen, only to change what is shown, navigate or download. Battery life can be prolonged dramatically by turning off the wireless connection, which is only needed to browse the Kindle Store, and download updates or new purchases.

Kindle’s screen is in some ways a blend of the e-paper concept and a traditional monitor, which means that in low light, it appears darker and is harder to see than the average printed page. E-paper works on the principle that the surface of a page reflects light, so no backlighting is necessary. The black text on white background should imitate this effect, but with the e-paper surface inset behind a plastic cover, there is a reduction in the reflective ability of the surface of the device.

The Vizplex screen, by E Ink, a company founded by e-paper researchers from MIT, is a matrix array of bistable microspheres, which can show black or white, or combine to give shades of gray. The microspheres react to encrypted electronic pulses that cause their visible surface to produce black or “white coloring”, which is really more like a very dark charcoal gray against a very light greenish gray. The effect is similar to the contrast of standard newsprint, more than to the higher quality paper of a bound book.

This effect may actually be designed to reduce glare or to protect the e-paper surface, but one could imagine a less light-absorbing plastic barrier, which would allow for better contrast. But in most settings, the contrast is excellent for comfortable reading, and the Kindle DX does, in fact, seem to “get out of the way”, allowing for direct engagement between reader and text, one of the stated goals for the Kindle’s being an improvement over most on-screen reading experiences.

One of the most comfortable, and useful, things about the Kindle DX, from this reviewer’s point of view, is news reading. Every morning, the most recent editions of the newspapers and magazines one has subscribed to are waiting to be read. One can shuffle through the content of major publications, like the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Yorker, or Salon. Blogs are also available, and they are updated multiple times per hour, so that any new content will appear on the same day it was posted to the blog online.

There is also a peppering of international media sources, so one can read the news in French or Spanish. The Shanghai Daily is also available, but it’s China news in English. I find it rewarding to get a look at the French daily Le Monde, which due to time-zone considerations, tends to publish 12 hours before the list-date, so I have a window onto international political news the day before it would otherwise reach us here.

Plus, it’s helpful for language skills to cross-compare vocabulary used in US political reporting and French-language reporting on the same issues. Buying foreign newspapers in the US can be a costly adventure and often produces only a pared-down version of the full publication. The Kindle allows instant pre-newsstand access to the original content.

The benefit the Kindle DX offers is not about browsing the web or searching for the latest information on a given subject; it’s about ease of reading and portability for a digital library, possibly thousands of titles and millions of pages, which can range from newsprint to literary fiction, summer romance to your favorite magazine. It’s about finding a comfortable way to make huge amounts of information highly portable.

Text is displayed simply, in something like the traditional black ink on white paper format, with indented paragraphs and justified margins. Devotion to the idea of mimicking the printed page is evident, and the streamlined text-intensive format, with few graphical enhancements is a welcome “cleaning up” of periodicals and websites that are increasingly noisy and given to complicated graphic-intensive layouts, kinetic Flash advertisements and other bells and whistles.

Personally, I would like to see more formatting options: for instance, a two-column re-format option that might give the Kindle text palette something of a magazine or newspaper-like feel, if the reader prefers it. It would also address the ages-old typesetting problem of making sure the horizontal line is not so long the eye loses its place on the return to the left margin. This could be done with very light-weight code that simply fits two columns into the same template where we presently see one.

A slightly wider screen or the choice of smaller text sizes, by the user, might be instrumental to making this function workable. On rotation, in landscape view, a three-column option might be nice as well. This kind of layout flexibility should be workable, because the Kindle format is uniform and privileges text over other media.

I also think there is need for a more dynamic index-page layout. For instance, when I open the New York Times Kindle Edition, I enter a “front page” which is in fact the opening to one article only. To see what else is included on the front page, I have to click to the right to navigate to the next article and then the next. (Each article shows at the foot of the page what the title of the next article is, but for periodicals, a list of headlines is hard to find — blogs do have them).

To locate the list of headlines in any given section of a newspaper, you have to click the 5-way navigation button when the option “view sections list” is highlighted at the foot of the page. Then, to the right of each section, there is a number, which is underscored with a dotted line. Clicking that number will reveal a list of headlines, like an rss feed. Clicking the section title will take you to the chosen first article, after which you must navigate to the right or go back to the sections list.

There is no clear reason I can think of why a Kindle Edition of any publication would not benefit from an itemized table of contents or index page. Since articles are already separated out and navigable by one-click navigation, there should be no significant modification to the way a Kindle Edition works to simply add an index page that provides a broad-view map of the publication’s contents.

Some users may at first be frustrated by the lack of browser-like menus and options. But the Kindle is designed to be mechanical, like a book. To highlight the text-on-paper reader-content relationship, the Kindle emphasizes the virtues of e-paper over the versatility of a laptop-style graphic-user-interface (GUI).

Menus are simple, static page-view lists, which one navigates by scrolling up or down the list, using the 5-way navigation button nested between the “MENU” and “BACK” buttons. Since the e-paper surface is not touch-sensitive, more dynamic page-flipping and graphic-intensive navigation options are not available. Also, there’s the low-energy logic of e-paper: those graphic-intensive touchscreen features require computing power, which means electric power, which means lower-battery life and more energy consumption.

To say we must compare the Amazon Kindle DX, or Kindle 2, to work being done by Apple, involving touchscreen devices, wireless download, online sale of electronic media, and the like, is to some extent unfair. The comparison is not really between rival products, but between possibly rival parallel technologies.

The touchscreen magic of the iPhone and iPod Touch have revolutionized gadgetry and our expectations about the intensity of focus on end-user interactive priorities, but they are based on a very different set of assumptions than the Kindle’s e-paper technology. The iPhone and iPod Touch are fully intended to be intensely diversified multimedia platforms, on which literally tens of thousands of services (“apps”) can be implemented.

The Amazon Kindle DX and Kindle 2 are, on the other hand, intended to be single-medium delivery vehicles, which do something like bring the vastness of a bookstore beyond any bricks-and-mortar inventory, to within 60 seconds of you, wherever you are. Apple’s products can mimic this effect, and there is a Kindle app for the iPhone and iPod Touch, but despite similarities, the two technologies remain distinct, and even parallel to one another, addressing different aesthetic and practical concerns.

I am tempted to frame the discussion as one rooted in a kind of ideal, looming up over the horizon: a large-format touch-sensitive full-color non-backlit edgeless e-paper device, which could take on any number of tempting, experimental or prevailing morphologies. Neither the Kindle nor the iPhone-type Apple devices meet this description, but both provide clues about what comes next.

The Kindle is a noble experiment, especially given the still highly experimental phase in which advanced e-paper finds itself, and due to its commitment to the text-on-paper experience, which more or less forces Amazon into a black-and-white world. The new Kindle devices enjoy 16 shades of gray, instead of just 4, but some users complain this has reduced contrast, which, by the way, cannot be adjusted.

It has to be said, the softer light radiating from the Kindle (entirely ambient light reflected on the static surface) is softer on the eyes than a backlit screen, which projects a constant stream of its own light directly onto the retina. If I look at the Kindle and my computer monitor side by side, my eyes want to get text from the Kindle, while my mind is curious about the color and definition afforded by a brilliant, gloss-front Mac laptop monitor.

What holds me back from really considering the Kindle a work companion, however, is the degree to which it limits my ability tocontribute. A laptop allows me to do all the typing and editing I may feel is appropriate. The Kindle is slower for typing and really only permits typing for search and for adding footnotes.

The footnote capacity is brilliant, it helps one feel like there is something like margin-scribbling going on —and each note goes into the My Clippings file, its own Kindle book on the main page— but I am compelled to rely on a paper notebook or a computer to do any real writing. I think it’s actually not a terrible inconvenience that the Kindle does not allow for more hands-on editing or file-creation. It keeps the focus on reading text, and compiling a substantial library, which can soar into the thousands of documents, if one pleases.

That’s no small feat in today’s world of acquired attention deficits and chronic compulsive surfing of options we never really explore. Oddly, the Kindle might do just what E Ink and Amazon’s developers say they want to do with e-paper: salvage the kind of prolonged attention and imaginative reading that we used to derive from books, the most important and enduring communicative medium in history.

When I get near the end of a page, I want to turn to the next and keep reading, if the content is good. Scrolling down the page on a web browser often does not induce —or permit— this effect. Scrolling is distracting: it requires hand-eye coordination and re-orients the brain’s motion-processing faculties. Turning a printed page or clicking the Kindle’s NEXT PAGE button don’t; they’re almost automatic reflexes, which allow the mind to keep “reading” —to stay in that mindset— while the page turns.

Apple has a great contribution to resolving this problem as well… on its devices, the Kindle reader actually flips pages out of the way, with a flick of the finger. This is essentially as convenient as a single click, executed by exerting just the slightest pressure with the thumb, but may involve more motor-skills and conscious brain involvement; it will also be necessary far more often, because the iPhone’s screen is less than 1/4 that of the Kindle DX.

So: in summary, the Kindle DX is a beautiful device; it accompanies the user admirably; it offers tempting interludes of enjoyable ergonomic reading; it stimulates the mind and responds to the user’s sudden urges to read this or that title not currently at hand. Its graphic quality achieves the stated goals, but is limited by the limitations of the current state of the art of commercially viable (cost-wise) e-paper technologies.

For reading text-books whose assets include full-color images, diagrams and detailed small-print tables and graphics, it will struggle. But the platform is ready to evolve with the e-paper technology, and it is not unreasonable to expect a full-color e-paper device within a year or two, if the right advances are made quickly enough.

If you need a touchscreen computer-like device, this is not your device. If you need something that acts like a book, but is electronic, lightweight, able to handle huge numbers of titles, and convenient to use, this is for you. Cost may be an issue, however: the Kindle DX currently retails for $489 and the Kindle 2 for $299. You have to pay for content, but you’ll get a better deal on that content than any paper version of the same publications.

As far as a work-tool: uploading PDF documents is simple, aided by a dedicated email address that automatically converts the PDF and sends it to the device wirelessly. But there is a cost of $0.15 for doing this, and the pages cannot be zoomed or resized, so small type or lightly colored type can be hard to make out.

The PDF documents cannot be so easily worked with as the Kindle Edition books and news publications. Underlining and footnoting does not work effectively, if at all, and so while reading and reviewing them, if properly sized, can be comfortable and convenient (you can store hundreds, or even thousands of them, on the Kindle), you need to take down your notes elsewhere.

I’m hoping for full-color non-backlit e-paper to arrive on the market before long —two years seems like a conservative bet—, and when that comes, look for e-paper and touchscreens to start converging. The technological problems inherent in achieving this are complicated, but the rewards could be immense for Amazon, for Apple, for readers, for publishers, for the news business, for all of us who use media or read printed pages or want more fluid access to global information.

My Kindle DX is a loaner, delivered by Amazon for me to review for this publication, and I add this final note, because it allows me to say that, whatever tweaks and improvements I would want to see made, as attendant technologies evolve, I will miss my Kindle DX the morning after I send it back. I will miss its convenience, its helpful way of delivering whole publications to me every day, keeping me informed, keeping me curious, keeping me reading whenever I can.

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Kindle DX: Beautiful, Focused, Comfortable, Imperfect, Inspired & Worth ‘Reading’

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