05-06-2009, 12:40 PM | #76 |
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In my opinion, it's the wrong step. It's a step that may hurt ePub and tell the world that PDF is a great eBook format. This is just so wrong on so many levels. Amazon botched the DX big time.
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05-06-2009, 12:42 PM | #77 | |
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Annotations supported in pdf?
Quote:
Do you know this for sure somewhere? From the user guide pdf it appears that the "Add Note & Highlight" menu item is disabled in the PDF. I couldn't find anything anywhere saying definitively if PDF annotation would be supported or not. If it is supported in properly OCRed files at least I will be all over buying one of these. If you can't annotate PDF files at all it is a total deal breaker for me. |
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05-06-2009, 12:42 PM | #78 |
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I like it, mostly. But I am not pre-ordering, yet.
First, it does seem it was a preemptive strike, against all the other 9.7" which are about to roll out, and probably against the 10" Apple notepad. The K DX is a reasonably sexy design, but so might be some of the competitors' readers, and some may have real touch screens, which would be sexier. Second, while it says "native" support for PDF, it also says it can display "most" PDFs. This can mean many things, but I'll wait and see. Plus, I am not sure their description implies reflowable PDF support, or PDF search capability, or zooming, or PDF dictionary support. So, me thinks, there is little reason to pre-order, until they are close to shipping, and we know what else is on the market at that time, and what exactly the KDX's PDF support consists of. P.S. Also, while 4GB sounds like a lot, a PDF title can easily be 20 megs or more (much more).... So, without card support, one can fill this up fast. Last edited by Sonist; 05-06-2009 at 12:48 PM. |
05-06-2009, 12:46 PM | #79 |
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Looks like the larger screen - except for PDF and image viewing - is largely wasted. You can put more text on the screen by choosing smaller text size, but then the line length is too long to be very readable. Should be an option to split into two columns, at least when in landscape mode - I didn't see this ability in the user manual.
Also, they really need to add better Unicode display support (Cyrillic, Chinese/Japanese/Korean) if they are targeting educational. While they are at it they can add this to K2 as well. Guess we will know when they ship, but it would be nice to know before that. |
05-06-2009, 12:46 PM | #80 | |
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05-06-2009, 12:47 PM | #81 |
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I'm holding my breath until I see some reviewers throw some real pdf files at it. PDF has gone through so many revisions, just like every adobe format, that it has to support of lot of different types of encoding. A lot of content has been scanned in without converting via OCR, so essentially it's a lot of bitmaps or other compressed graphics. I want to see how it deals with 400 mb pdfs that are only a couple hundred pages long, which is another drawback of not having an SD slot. I'm more concerned about legacy support than anything else. For new creations I really have no wish to become a latex expert when epub will do just fine - mobi just doesn't have the presentation capabilities epub has.
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05-06-2009, 12:48 PM | #82 | |
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05-06-2009, 12:51 PM | #83 |
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Hey, everybody. I actually attended the Amazon press conference today. (I said I was "from mobileread.com"; I hope you don't mind, Alex!) I took some pictures and some video, and got to handle the DX a little bit. I'll be starting another thread with some comments, pics, info, and links to movies, as soon as they finish uploading to Youtube.
In the meantime I'll say that it seems to me like a killer app. Amazon just totally raised the bar with this. I don't know about pdf highlighting/note-taking, but I can say that pdfs are totally readable even in portrait orientation. In landscape orientation, you're essentially seeing the pdf full-size, half a page at a time. The screen is 8"x5.5", which is pretty much half of a standard letter-sized page. The DX is a bit heavy and feels quite solid. I'm not a huge fan of the buttons, but the keyboard is unobtrusive and seems to serve its purpose. More soon! |
05-06-2009, 12:53 PM | #84 | |
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Did you meet Dennis? Too bad I didn't know earlier, you guys could have said hello to each other. |
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05-06-2009, 12:54 PM | #85 |
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Actually, there's a menu option to change the column width from full page to a narrower column, in addition to changing the text size. I don't remember seeing anything about multi-column mode, though.
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05-06-2009, 12:55 PM | #86 |
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I preordered the DX. Larger screen and PDF support makes it a no brainer.
I strongly dislike PDF for fiction but I literally have a wall of craft books (needlearts and others) that will be great on the DX once I scan and convert them to PDF. PDF is a great document format for technical books that contain lots of tables and charts (sounds like a lot like my craft books!) Not supporting ePub doesn't really bother me. It's one of those "It'd be nice" but it won't stop me from preordering the DX. I'll still keep my K2 for portable reading. |
05-06-2009, 12:56 PM | #87 |
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In case anyone cares... the DX's model number is: D00611
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05-06-2009, 01:00 PM | #88 | |
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05-06-2009, 01:00 PM | #89 | ||
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Quote:
See the guide page #66. It clearly states: Quote:
I've got one pre-ordered, but will cancel spot-on if I find out annotations in PDF are not supported. |
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05-06-2009, 01:00 PM | #90 | |
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I hope that Adobe is not having second thoughts about ePub. That would be very frightening news. |
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