Target audience for Amazon's Kindle DX?
Posted in This Just In... on May 6th, 2009 by gkrakow
The new larger Kindle is touted as being perfect for reading textbooks. Remember textbooks? –large, heavy items that college students need to buy? They’re super expensive and trees have to be cut down to make them.
So today, Amazon introduced a new, larger electronic book reader, the Kindle DX, to bring textbooks into the 21st Century. It features a 9.7-inch (diagonal) B&W screen (2-1/2 times the size of the Kindle 2’s) that can rotate from portrait to landscape modes (up/down to sideways) and can now handle PDF files as well. That’s the pluses.
The minuses include no SD-card slot – a slow drawing and difficult to read screen (in some lighting conditions) – and it costs $489.
That’s not a typo. It’s meant for college students and Amazon has priced it at nearly $500!
This wouldn’t be so bad if Time Magazine hadn’t just wrritten that Kindle buyers are the over-50 crowd – with large numbers of 60+ Kindle fans. Not college students.
I hope schools are planning to subsidize DX hardware. Cheaper textbooks for students are a good deal. I hope downloadable textbooks will also be readable on Amazon’s free iPhone app – a $500 savings right off the bat.
Finally, books are made from paper which breaks down in the environment relatively quickly. I’m not so sure how long it will take for Kindle devices to turn to dust.