|
I am a retired editor who worked at a major publisher for 25 years. I am a reading junky who has owned a Sony 505, an iLiad (still own), and a Kindle DX (still own). I like to read a full page of text rather than parts of one, and that is why I bought the iRex and the Kindle DX (and why I don't read books often on my iPhone). I should add that most of my reading is of pdf files. I have no objection to epub, djvu, chm, txt, rtf, etc. But most of my files happen to be pdfs.
I bought the Kindle DX despite knowing of its absolutely ludicrous design faults: (1) miserable keyboard; (2) lack of unicode support (in a machine supposed to appeal to the college market?); (3) unfathomable lack of support for folders in the file system; lack of what I regard as sufficient storage (my library of English-language publications is about 50GB, of Chinese about 310GB); lack of external storage other than my laptops or desktops.
The Kindle is fine if all you do is read English language books and don't have so many that you have to organize them to locate a particular title easily; I read a lot of Chinese and Russian (yes, I know, if I have my pdfs embed the fonts, I can read Chinese and Russian on the Kindle, but that doesn't help with the Kindle's content display unless I translate the file names into English). I am aware of many ways to process my book files so that they are more easily located; dragging all my archaeology books to a folder called Archaeology would be easier.
BUT, the Kindle DX does handle my pdfs, most of them, very nicely.
As to 3G availability: I use it occasionally in the DX, but since I do the bulk of my reading at home, where I have 802.11n, and at places that have wireless access, iPad wireless would do just fine for me; I don't download books so frequently that instant availability is an issue. And I sincerely doubt that many people do.
One thing I've not been able to figure out about the Kindle (among many) is why Bezos decided not to include 802.11g. When people download via their own or other people's networks, Amazon doesn't have to pay for Sprint's carrying the freight.
The faults I've listed for the Kindle DX were largely avoided by earlier machines, like the iLiad: it had wireless, folders, external storage -- SD and CF -- (and digital ink input). If Bezos' folk had ever tried to use their own machines for reading, they might have adopted a few of the "innovations" pioneered by Sony and iRex (no folders in a Linux file system?).
|