My initial thoughts about the Kindle DX: The price seems surprisingly reasonable. The iRex with an A4 size screen was over $800. I’m not convinced that textbooks are workable on an e-book reader. You don’t read textbooks linearly. (Or at least, I never did.) The ability to flip around between marked locations is limited on the Kindle 2, and I’m guessing it will be on the DX as well. On the other hand, the size and weight benefits are hard to deny.
I will allow myself to buy an Amazon Kindle. But first, I must read all the books on my “books to read” shelf. Except “Infinite Jest”, the size of which makes it a prime candidate for e-book reading.
Dear Amazon, You’re so almost there with your new Kindle e-book. There are just a few minor details you need to fix to get me on board. First of all, you need Mac support, and preferably Linux support as well, both for content creation and for reading books. There’s really no excuse for not having reader support, as you have a working Mobipocket reader in Java that will run on Mac and Linux, you just haven’t taken the time to package it up properly.
I was kinda enthusiastic about the iPhone…then I found out from Macintouch that it’s a closed, locked down unit. Forget about installing software to use it as an e-book reader, or reading Word documents or PDFs. You’re not going to be using it to give business presentations. Forget about downloading music via the WiFi connection. Forget about writing your own neat applications and running them. There’s no Xcode iPhone developer kit, and Apple apparently has no plans to produce one for public use.