|
For the textbook market you need a larger screen, like the dx, but you also need color for diagrams and charts. I suspect hyperlinks are also important. Therefore, I suspect Amazon will hold off on the Dx upgrade until their rumored 10 inch version of their forthcoming media device.
In terms of PDFs, my take is that you need to go with an iPad for now. If the price is too high, look for someone with an iPad 1 who is selling it on eBay.
To show you where I am coming from, I love my kindle and use it for pleasure reading, but it's my iPad plus the iAnnotate software for PDFs. There are several things I think a good academic PDF reader needs.
First, you need some way to acquire PDFs. You want to able to cross reference a new doc, or just go to the library and search/find docs. This means a web browser that you can use while on campus. If you have to wait to go back home to load new PDFs it will really put a crimp in your study plans. And, using kindle eink browser to search things from your library or download from your student course site is a sure route to frustration.
Next, you really need annotation for academic PDFs. These things are thick reading (I don't mean their physical size). You read a dozen of these and you will forget what the second one says. When you read them, your goal should be to distill the doc down into a manageable chunk. I go through them and underline insightful sections and highlight sections I might want to cite later. Then I write a brief summary from four words to two sentences on the front of the document.
The thing is that it's hard to know what a given document means if you can't see it in context of the entire set of documemts. So you read/summarize them all once. then you gather the entire stack together and use their summaries to see how they all fit together.
All of this means that an electronic version of this needs highlights, underlining, and typing and diagraming. This, unfortunately means touch screen LCD and not eink. And right now it means iannotate on an iPad.
|