I ordered a Kindle 3 DX from Amazon on Wednesday and it arrived yesterday. Tried it last night and got mixed feelings.
It is a great tool to read books from Amazon. I downloaded two Jules Verne's sci-fi: Twenty leagues under the sea and The mysterious island. They are free since they are published before 1929! They are my favorites since my teenage.
I also transferred a PDF book I read recently, Lucene in Action 2nd Edition. The viewing of PDF is very good. The only inconvenience is that I cannot highlight or annotate on PDF, and the Table of Content and navigation to next Chapter by the 5-way stick do not work. But, still, they are acceptable.
The worst thing I have experienced with Kindle 3DX is reading of 2-column scientific papers. The font size is too small in portrait mode. When turning to landscape mode, the font size is large enough, but I loose the big picture of the whole page and the operation to turn page is painful: it requires to press twice "down" button to finish reading the left column and then press twice "up" button to read the right one. Also the lack of capability to add annotations and highlights becomes a big minus when reading scientific papers. After doing some research online and I found the only solution is to cut the 2-column page into 4 parts and there are some free tools to do so. But the reading experience is still very poor.
My conclusion is: Kindle is designed to read novels and it does the best for this purpose. But for academia, Kindle is not our solution. Though iPad is of the same size, it is much easier to manipulate the PDF files by touch screen and numerous apps. So I think I'd better to return the Kindle DX and buy a Kindle 6" for leisure reading and iPad for academia reading respectively.
It is a great tool to read books from Amazon. I downloaded two Jules Verne's sci-fi: Twenty leagues under the sea and The mysterious island. They are free since they are published before 1929! They are my favorites since my teenage.
I also transferred a PDF book I read recently, Lucene in Action 2nd Edition. The viewing of PDF is very good. The only inconvenience is that I cannot highlight or annotate on PDF, and the Table of Content and navigation to next Chapter by the 5-way stick do not work. But, still, they are acceptable.
The worst thing I have experienced with Kindle 3DX is reading of 2-column scientific papers. The font size is too small in portrait mode. When turning to landscape mode, the font size is large enough, but I loose the big picture of the whole page and the operation to turn page is painful: it requires to press twice "down" button to finish reading the left column and then press twice "up" button to read the right one. Also the lack of capability to add annotations and highlights becomes a big minus when reading scientific papers. After doing some research online and I found the only solution is to cut the 2-column page into 4 parts and there are some free tools to do so. But the reading experience is still very poor.
My conclusion is: Kindle is designed to read novels and it does the best for this purpose. But for academia, Kindle is not our solution. Though iPad is of the same size, it is much easier to manipulate the PDF files by touch screen and numerous apps. So I think I'd better to return the Kindle DX and buy a Kindle 6" for leisure reading and iPad for academia reading respectively.
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