Amazon Kindle DX: Big Screen for Textbooks, Newspapers, Magazines

Hyper-convergence paradigm, Intellectual Property Preserve :: Comments (3)

6 May 2009 :: by J.E. Robertson

Amazon.com’s Kindle and Kindle 2 devices have revolutionized the market for electronic books. Wireless devices allowing download of new books in just minutes, for reading on a high-resolution e-paper screen, which reads much like real paper, they have made the experience of hosting and paging through e-books much more user-friendly. Now, Amazon has introduced the Amazon Kindle DX, which will ship this summer, with a screen 2.5 times larger, to make it possible to read magazines or PDF documents as designed.

That allows for a better visual environment for reading and also for a newspaper, magazine or textbook experience more akin to reading on paper. The Kindle DX is, for its understanding of the size issue in e-paper technologies, perhaps the most serious contribution to electronic reading devices yet produced. It gives real priority to the sensory experience of the reader. It also flips to landscape view when the device is rotated, allowing for facing page view or full map or image presentation.

At The Hot Spring, we predicted in early March what the real next leap forward in e-reading will be: we called it the page-perfect e-reader, a reference to its edge-to-edge letter-sized format, allowing it to effectively mimic the content presentation of magazines, as well as the facing-page experience of bound books, and the screen size of a small to medium laptop computer. This could enable the same device to double as a low-power computing platform.

Its e-paper screen would allow for more conservative use of electricity, and for optimum effectiveness, it would be equipped with touchscreen capability. The Amazon Kindle DX is a clear example of a step in that direction, recognizing the need for a larger screen, a mutable visual environment (it rotates, which allows the user to adjust the reading environment according to taste or content), and the urge to read as many electronic documents in one place as possible (here, it’s PDF documents).

The page-perfect device would, however, have no more mechanical keys or buttons than does the Apple iPhone, and would be fully manipulable via its graphic-user interface (GUI). It would aim to mimic as closely as possible the notion of real paper (which is not equipped with buttons), while also allowing for a maximum manipulability via conjurable on-screen interactive features, which ‘hide’ when one is reading.

The DX offers one of the key features we project will be part of the page-perfect e-reading paradigm shift: free connectivity. Amazon funds the 3G connectivity of the Kindle devices, something it can do because so much of the Kindle content is paid reading. Allowing download of personal PDF files helps move the Kindle closer to the page-perfect paradigm, in which unpaid content would also be accessible, over a wireless internet connection, without charge.

The device does let you add annotations to documents, which is another area where it is moving closer to the reader-centered design experience of the hypothetical page-perfect device. It also allows for text-size adjustment and other minor refinements of the reading environment. As Amazon notes in its own introduction to the product:

With Kindle DX’s large display, reading newspapers is more enjoyable than ever. The 5-way controller lets you quickly flip between articles, making it fast and easy to browse and read the morning paper. Want to remember the article you just read? Clip and save entire articles for later reading with a single click.

The flexibility of the device has certain limitations. Its reliance on mechanical buttons for user interface can be seen as an asset by some who feel it leaves a more ‘pure’ reading surface on-screen, but this also means the reading surface is designed to be less malleable. We would like to see a move toward more user-designed reading environments, with the potential to manipulate color and to paste secondary documents (i.e. images, related source material), and even to doodle in the margins of a page.

This will certainly come, either by way of bold, built-in innovations, or through a widget or plug-in feature, like those made available to iPhone users through the App Store. We are hoping to get a closer look at the DX to assess its aesthetic virtues and to evaluate what about it will make it the proper platform for the next level of e-paper innovation. Until then, we can only say: it’s been a great and timely innovation, and we hope it does do good things for the magazine and newspaper businesses.

And maybe, the DX 2 will have free web browsing or email download… just maybe…

• As part of our Intellectual Property Preserve, this article contains some ideas that are more proposals than reporting. If you would like to collaborate with the author or seek further information for a potential partnership regarding the implementation of some of these ideas, please contact The Hot Spring at: think.media@casavaria.com