Thinking about a Kindle DX

I’ve been think­ing about buy­ing a Kin­dle DX ebook reader, given my addic­tion to books, both busi­ness and per­sonal. On a recent flight from Boston I finally saw the larger DX model being used by my seat­mate.  A devel­op­ment man­ager for Microsoft, she uses hers on long flights to catch up on pro­fes­sional read­ing (long tech­ni­cal white papers, inter­nal reports, etc.) and then relax with a favorite book. Her enthu­si­asm reawak­ened my inter­est in Kindle.

This week­end another Kin­dle fan tried to per­suade me to buy one for sus­tain­abil­ity rea­sons (“Save the trees!”) My friend is wildly enthu­si­as­tic about her Kin­dle 2, and enjoys the smaller size because she can just throw it in her purse. Know­ing what I spend on books, she’s been encour­ag­ing me to buy a Kin­dle for sev­eral years. It would be great for busi­ness travel, she says, or while wait­ing for appointments.

For pro­fes­sional rea­sons I’ve been wait­ing for the larger for­mat as well as robust sup­port for PDF, given the need to read or search busi­ness doc­u­ments in PDF for­mat. For me the ques­tion is, is the DX good enough or should I keep wait­ing for a next gen model?

Unan­swered Questions

I’m intrigued but still see some poten­tial deal break­ers with today’s DX model… Check­ing the user reviews leaves me with some unan­swered questions:

• Does Ama­zon ever issue firmware updates to resolve soft­ware problems?
• Does the bat­tery wear out over time and need replace­ment – or is your only option to buy a new device?
• Do they plan to add folder sup­port to help peo­ple man­age the assets they acquire over time – or will this be avail­able only on  future devices?
• If you hate it or find that it just doesn’t meet your needs, will Ama­zon take it back and refund your money?

Is This a Trans­ac­tion or a Relationship?

My expe­ri­ence with the iPhone makes me a firm believer in the man­date for portable device man­u­fac­tur­ers to fix iden­ti­fied glitches in their soft­ware via peri­odic firmware updates. Apple has rou­tinely addressed prob­lems and improved the iPhone’s usabil­ity via firmware updates. (This is one rea­son why I’m so delighted with my iPhone.) Other con­sumer elec­tron­ics device com­pa­nies – like Ama­zon – should fol­low Apple’s example.

There’s no evi­dence in the user forums that Ama­zon has embraced a pol­icy of con­tin­u­ous improve­ment via firmware updates. This is a big issue, because I know their expe­ri­ence as a device devel­oper and man­u­fac­turer is quite lim­ited in com­par­i­son to com­pa­nies like Apple and Sony. A pol­icy of firmware updates would make me more con­fi­dent in this brand.

Con­sumer – Not Pro­fes­sional – Sup­port for PDF

From user reviews I see the DX model has lots of prob­lems with its “native PDF” sup­port – issues that Ama­zon has not yet resolved with a firmware update. (Source: own­ers’ feed­back within the user reviews sec­tion of Amazon’s Kin­dle Store.) Here are the lim­i­ta­tions that trou­ble me: 

• No abil­ity to adjust the font size within a PDF doc­u­ment once it’s stored on the Kindle
• Embed­ded links within a PDF don’t work – this is a sta­tic PDF reader…
• Prob­lems stor­ing PDF doc­u­ments con­tain­ing spaces in the file name or other char­ac­ter sequences – files get lost?

These lim­i­ta­tions with the built-in PDF reader make it hard to jus­tify the Kin­dle as a busi­ness pur­chase — and its price means it’s hard to jus­tify for per­sonal reasons.

When I think about it as a con­sumer and reg­u­lar library patron, the Kindle’s incom­pat­i­bil­ity with the for­mats sup­ported by pub­lic libraries is another cause for con­cern (although I under­stand Amazon’s busi­ness rea­sons for this con­straint). And to be hon­est I love typog­ra­phy and cringe at the fact that I’ll have to live with the lim­ited set of fonts that the Kin­dle supports.

Rea­sons to Stall

Net net: I ques­tion the value equa­tion in the pricey Kin­dle DX. Mean­while my lack of con­fi­dence in a 100% money-back guar­an­tee from Ama­zon (given feed­back from dis­grun­tled own­ers) causes me to con­tinue post­pon­ing a pur­chase deci­sion. Before buy­ing one, I’d have to undergo a trial expe­ri­ence to see if its ben­e­fits could moti­vate me to over­look the fea­ture lim­i­ta­tions I already know about. So for now, I’ll keep stalling.

What’s your expe­ri­ence been with Kin­dle DX’s PDF sup­port? Is it good enough for busi­ness requirements?

Tagged as: Kindle DX