Students taking part in the pilot program have all sorts of complaints about the device, mostly centering around the fact that it's a huge pain to take notes and "interact" with the text. Here's what student Aaron Horvath has to say about it:

"I hate to sound like a Luddite, but this technology is a poor excuse of an academic tool. It's clunky, slow and a real pain to operate. Much of my learning comes from a physical interaction with the text: bookmarks, highlights, page-tearing, sticky notes and other marks representing the importance of certain passages - not to mention margin notes, where most of my paper ideas come from and interaction with the material occurs. All these things have been lost, and if not lost they're too slow to keep up with my thinking, and the ‘features' have been rendered useless.

Yee-ouch! Further complaints include the fact that the lack of concrete page numbers make citing sources a huge pain in the ass and the fact that you need to charge up the battery for it to work. I guess physical textbooks will be around for a while longer, eh? [Daily Princetonian via Engadget]

Aaaand we can't not do a proper sizemodo, naturally:

The app is free, but you'll need preexisting subscriptions to textbooks in order to access any. It's actually a shrewd, if somewhat obvious move for CourseSmart: lots of college kids have iPhones and iPod Touches, and while taking notes and reading long passages might be a little cumbersome on such a tiny screen, the ability to carry all your books in-pocket, complete with search and bookmarking capabilities, is a pretty big value-add.

As far back as May, it was clear that Amazon was pursuing CourseSmart for e-textbook content, an effort that may have culminated in a wimpy partnership with McGraw-Hill—a CourseSmart partner—which netted the ebook reader, and specifically the textbook-reader DX, about 100 regular old e-textbooks. This looks like something of a snub to me, or maybe just a lack of initiative on Amazon's part, but I get the feeling there's a still a lot going on behind closed doors here.

Anyway, do you want to hear all about this same story again, this time run through cable news' inexplicably tech-illiterate (and possibly word-illiterate) tech reporters? Sure you do! TEXT BOX! I-PHONE! Good lord.
[WSJ, Fox Business]

His complaints are many, and almost all justified: the grey screen is too grey, there aren't enough books available, stuff other than the text (such as pictures) don't come through well, its newspaper subscriptions leave entire articles out and reading on it just isn't a pleasurable experience. Hell, he doesn't even bring up the whole remote-deletion thing; that must have happened after they went to print.

All in all, it's a pretty damning takedown of Amazon's flagship device. Sure, you can dismiss some of his arguments (textbooks look terrible on the Kindle 2, but they probably look better on the DX), but taken as a whole, it sure doesn't leave you wanting to buy one. And he discovers things I certainly didn't know about it, like its shoddy newspaper conversion.

It's enjoyable if you like reading Nexis printouts. The Kindle Times ($13.99 per month) lacks most of the print edition's superb photography-and its subheads and call-outs and teasers, its spinnakered typographical elegance and variety, its browsableness, its Web-site links, its listed names of contributing reporters, and almost all captioned pie charts, diagrams, weather maps, crossword puzzles, summary sports scores, financial data, and, of course, ads, for jewels, for swimsuits, for vacationlands, and for recently bailed-out investment firms. A century and a half of evolved beauty and informational expressiveness is all but entirely rinsed away in this digital reductio.

Sometimes whole articles and op-ed contributions aren't there. Three pieces from the July 8, 2009, print edition of the Times-Adam Nagourney on Sarah Palin's resignation, Alessandra Stanley on Michael Jackson's funeral, and David Johnston on the civil rights of detainees-were missing from the Kindle edition, or at least I haven't managed to find them (they're available free on the Times Web site); the July 9th Kindle issue lacked the print edition's reporting on interracial college roommates and the infectivity rates of abortion pills. I checked again on July 20th and 21st: Verlyn Klinkenborg's appreciation of Walter Cronkite was absent, as was a long piece on Mongolian shamanism.

The Kindle DX ($489) doesn't save newspapers; it diminishes and undercuts them-it kills their joy. It turns them into earnest but dispensable blogs.

Like I said, damning. His solution to people who want a digital version of their books? Buy an iPhone or iPod touch. I'm not sure I agree with that, as I'm still a sucker for paperbacks, but it makes sense. Do we really need a device solely for reading books when so many of us have perfectly capable book-reading devices in our pockets right now?

But man, Amazon can't be happy with the timing of this article, especially one of this scope coming from The New Yorker, a publication that is read by the heart of the Kindle's potential customer base: well-heeled literary nerds. It's pure coincidence that it dropped the week after Orwellgate, but it sure seems like the honeymoon is over with the Kindle. It's just not the device that is going to convince everyone to jump on the eBook bandwagon. Sure, it's got its fans, but regular books are still safe, for now. [The New Yorker]

Courtesy of MAKE, we have this interesting "hack" that provides step-by-step instructions for getting 1984 back on your Kindle—timid publishers frightened of New Media be damned.

It's not too complicated a process, other than that expensive plane ticket of course, but there are a few instructions and tools you'll need, so head over to MAKE when you're ready.

If you're already in Australia and care to embark on this completely free-of-charge literary journey, send us some interesting shots of you giving Big Brother the picture while reading 1984, won't you? [MAKE]

I am certain this gave Amazon honcho Jeff Bezos one hell of a tingle when he saw the report, but in spite of the repeated mentions of Amazon and Kindle, I'm pretty sure he had very little to do with it himself. Here's why:

The DLC—'scuse me, NDLC—estimates the up-front cost of materials to be around $200, but could fall to $80 by 2012. Since the government now spends about $109 per student on text books, the initial investment seems in line. However, I don't think they're looking at the appropriate model. The Kindle 2's teardown revealed that it costs around $185, but that includes $60 for the 6" screen. Don't these fat cats in Washington know that textbooks only work on the $489 DX (and even then just barely)? Even at cost, I guarantee you're looking at a lot more than $200 per kid for one with a 10" screen.

And don't even get me started on the subject of smashed Kindle screens.

Doing the math here, my numbers are a lot higher than the DLC's, and furthermore my estimates on E-Ink's future price drop are way more pessimistic. Especially since the jury (meaning us) is still out on the longevity of E-Ink as an ideal screen technology, and only volume will really drive down the price. Wait a few years, see what happens with LCD, with laptops and netbooks, with iPhones and other smartphone platforms, and then, just maybe, you'll be able to select a decent product to subsidize 56 million times over.

Oh, and dudes, don't go creating terms like eTextbook—we already have lingo for this stuff, and you sound like you just arrived in a time machine from 1996. [DLC via New York Times]

Like Matt's real life Kindle problem shows, it doesn't matter how many tests you run, something will always screw your toys. [Silicon Alley Insider]

Speaking at a conference this week, Bezos laid out his vision for the Kindle brand in full. Core to his plan is that the Kindle hardware and Kindle book divisions have an, uhh, open relationship:

The device team has the job of making the most remarkable purpose-built reading device in the world. We are going to give the device team competition. We will make Kindle books, at the same $9.99 price points, available on the iPhone, and other mobile devices and other computing devices.

An open-access Kindle bookstore would pose a threat to the reader's market share, so either Bezos has something mysterious up his sleeve, or he's come to terms with the fact that the Kindle—and indeed every dedicated e-reader—is essentially a stopgap device, awkwardly carrying out its single, simple task until something more versatile comes along.

When that happens, whichever company runs the de facto ebook store will stand to make tremendous amounts of money, and if Bezos' comments are anything to go by, he's planning for Amazon to assume that role. For now, though, it's all talk: Kindle iPhone app aside, the only way to read Amazon's ebooks is to plunking down some serious cash on one of the Kindle flavors. These "mobile devices and other computing devices" sound promising: let's see them. [NYT]

When dismantled, you can see that even when the power is switched off, the text is still clearly displayed on the front LCD. And, we knew the Kindle DX was thin—full review right here—but when taken apart, it's simply amazing how much gadgetry is shoved into it—six memory chips and a processor. Head over to RapidRepair for instructions and more photos. [RapidRepair]

I know now I have a love/hate relationship with Kindle. The drive of Amazon to make this unlikely little thing a star is inspiring in a world where most companies just go around copying each other. Amazon has, from the beginning, delivered on so many of promises of e-readers—cheap books delivered instantly to a lightweight screen that's easy on the eyes and stays powered for days on a single battery charge.

The Kindle 2 that hit this spring was a disappointment, nothing but a Kindle 1 with a more predictable design and some novelty tricks.

The DX, arriving just months later, solves real problems of the first generation. Internally, it has native PDF support, which allows for reading of the vast bulk of formal business literature, not to mention a bazillion easy-to-download copyright-free (free-free!) works of actual literature. Externally, the DX's larger 10-inch screen makes it better suited to handle the content, not just PDFs, but textbooks, whose heavily formatted pages would look shabby on the smaller Kindle's 6-inch screen.

The DX also has an inclinometer, so you can flip it sideways or even upside down. I didn't know what that was for at first—but I do now.

The DX is not-so-secretly the smartest thing Amazon could do to show academic publishers it was time to green up and get with digital distribution. But it's a real "if you build it, they will come" strategy, because although Amazon has announced that it "reached an agreement" with the three publishers who account for 60% of textbooks sold—Pearson, Cengage Learning and Wiley (but not Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)—we haven't seen any actual textbooks distributed to Kindles yet and, more upsettingly, we have no idea how much they will cost or what weird rights issues may be involved in their "sale."

So while we're sitting here, DX in hand, waiting for the real reason for its existence to come to fruition, it doesn't hurt to talk about it as a reader for regular books, right?

I am currently a little over halfway through Ken Follett's Pillars of the Earth, a heavyweight champ of a book, even in paperback, that sits on my chest each night, restricting my breathing until I have no choice but to fall asleep.

As you can see from the scale shots below, the DX weighs about half as much as the paperback, a real load off my chest. (Sorry, couldn't resist.) As Kindle lover Chen is apt to point out, the Kindle 2 is just half the weight of the DX, but I counter with this lazy man's factoid: Even using a slightly larger font, I can see the equivalent of two and a half Kindle 2 pages on a DX screen. It is, in fact, a better reading experience.

When it comes to PDFs, the Kindle DX lives up to its unambitious promise: There they are, in the menu, the minute you copy them from your computer to the Kindle via USB. What won't show up are .doc, .docx, Excel spreadsheets or any other text-based pseudo-standards from the Microsoft people, and no images either.

The good and bad thing about the PDFs is that they appear squarely in the DX's 10-inch rectangular frame, "no panning, no zooming, no scrolling," as Amazon's bossman Jeff Bezos likes to say. This is wonderful when you have a PDF like my free copy of Bram Stoker's Dracula. It's presented in a big clear font and saved to PDF, meaning I can't change the font size, but I don't want to either. The trouble arises when you have something like the HP product brochure below. Damn thing was meant to be seen on a computer, with full-color graphics and the ability to zoom in on the fine print. As you can see, some print is so small, the Kindle's slightly chunky E-Ink screen resolution can't render it legibly.

That's when I found that you really can zoom.

Remember I mentioned that inclinometer, that orients the screen horizontally or vertically depending on how you hold it? It's not terribly useful for Kindle books, which are meant to look great in vertical (portrait) orientation. But when you're looking at a PDF, and you can't read everything, tilting the whole deal 90 degrees gets you a bit of a zoom. How much? If you think about it, that's a little over 20%, not a lot, but a bit of a boost when you need it. The PDF support is so convenient, but means I especially miss the SD card slot from the first Kindle. It would make life with the DX a far sight easier.

So the screen is bigger, but perhaps still not big enough, at least for the text books and businessy documents. I'm happy to say that it's finally reached the minimum required size for recreational reading, which is what most people will be buying it for anyway.

I haven't got a lot to say about the newspaper industry that the Kindle will allegedly save, except that Kindle newspapers don't look or feel anything like real newspapers, so they may disappoint a few old-schoolers out there. You don't even get a fat front page of options pointing in all directions, but instead, incomplete tables of contents segregated by section. I am glad for the newspaper distribution on Kindle, but only in the same way that I am glad for the faxed New York Times cheatsheets they hand out at resorts that are too far from mainland USA to get an actual paper on time. Seriously, if this is somehow more accessible than reading a newspaper on a laptop, I'll eat my hat.

The same goes for the text-to-speech that publishers are all frightened of. Sure, computer-generated voices are getting better, and the precedent set here might eventually shut down some voice-talent union, but in the meantime, their jobs are safe: I can't imagine how anyone could listen to more than a paragraph. Apparently neither can Amazon: In the Kindle DX, the speech controls are buried, and you have to memorize a keystroke combination to get it working.

The DX also doesn't give any new hope for E-Ink as a sustainable platform. The many people who bitch that color is king are not wrong, exactly, but color E-Ink is puke-tastic and far from cheap. Monochrome E-Ink may look nice by the light of your nightstand lamp—and thank God Amazon hasn't gone and mucked it up like Sony did with that PRS (more like POS)-700—but it's still too slow to leaf around the way you would a serious work of literature. (My best example of this is still Infinite Jest by the late great David Foster Wallace. I was surprised to discover that it's actually finally available as a Kindle book, every glorious footnote intact albeit cumbersomely hyperlinked. I have always assumed it would be more daunting on a Kindle than in book form, but now that I have a chance to find out, I'll have to get back to you.)

Unless E-Ink gets cheaper, faster, bigger and more colorful all at once, it's doomed. The iPhone is an all-around worse system for book readin', but way more people have iPhones, so it could beat Kindle by sheer momentum. And Mary Lou Jepsen's Pixel Qi company is working on a new LCD screen that—like the OLPC XO screen she was instrumental in devising—will run on less power, be easy on the eyes in natural light, and have optimized modes for both black-and-white and color.

The hope for the current Kindles is that these boring old black-and-white textbooks we keep hearing about appear on the horizon like an army of indignant Ents. Give every college kid a DX and the chance to download half their texts to Kindle, and all bets are off.

So what happens next? Well like I said, we wait.

In Summary

Best ebook reader to date

Native PDF support

Larger screen means (almost) everything is easier to read

E-Ink screen is easy on the eyes and battery efficient, but makes pages slow to "turn" and does not come in color

Textbooks would be ideal, so let's see the deals

$489 price tag is steep

No zooming means some PDFs will be unreadable

Of course, she doesn't actually use this to memorize her lines. For that, she has a little midget inside her ear to repeat them back for her in real time. I wonder what she's reading. [Egotastic - Thanks Travis!]

Ed. note: That bit about the DX, that was a joke, having to do with Hayden P.'s minuscule size. You know? Oh, nevermind.

Made of wood to prove some sort of point that we totally get, but because we understand it so well, we'd feel embarrassed explaining, the Amazon Kindling is the only wooden, wireless reading device on eBay today. Sure, a paper book might hold more pages, but paper makes for a short-lived campfire...though secondhand Danielle Steel paperbacks are probably in better supply these days than actual trees. [eBay and Evil Mad Scientist and cockeyed via Treehugger]

The Kindle's voice feature works like any other, so pronunciation foibles are expected, and even predictable. Says the developer Nuance, the technology licensed by Amazon:

It's not even considered a bug. If it encounters a word it has never seen, it approaches it almost like a kid, phonetically.

But for the speech feature to be useful in a newspaper context, as Amazon wishes it to be, its library will have to be constantly updated—over the air, presumably—with pronunciation overrides for whatever weird names or places are in the news at a given time.

Of course, this would be extremely unwieldy and only marginally effective, so Amazon probably won't do it. Good luck with today's leading NYT story, Kindle owners. You might even have to read it. [NYT]

According to James Moroney, President and CEO of the Dallas Morning News, Amazon demands a ludicrous cut of newspaper sales for distribution on the Kindle. From his talk with the Senate:

The Kindle, which I think is a marvelous device, the best deal Amazon will give the Dallas Morning News-and we've negotiated this up to the last two weeks-they want 70 percent of the subscriptions revenue. I get 30 percent, they get 70 percent. On top of that they have said we get the right to republish your intellectual property to any portable device. Now is that a business model that is going to work for newspapers?

You'd think that Amazon would be smarter, taking a cue from Apple's iTunes and just skimming enough off the top of subscriptions to sell more Kindle hardware. But then again, Amazon is in a tricky situation. They're a retailer at heart, not a hardware manufacturer. And they're attempting to make money on both sides of the print business.

Surely, the NYT didn't agree to such a one-sided Kindle distribution model. But Amazon seems ready to milk smaller papers like the Dallas Morning News for all they're worth...which I'm doubting is very much to begin with. [paidContent via CrunchGear and Image]

UPDATE: Maybe the NYT doesn't have a better deal than the Dallas Morning News. According to a reliable source in the know, The New Yorker's Kindle split is divided 33% New Yorker, 33% Amazon, and 33% wireless carrier. Without ad subsidies, it's hard to view this model as sustainable.

I mean, you do realize, all those fancy Kindle DX firmware functions, like .pdf support and line length adjustment (an easy way to add space to the margins), won't be coming to the Kindle 2 or Kindle 1. Amazon claims that these updates are dependent on screen size. But wouldn't you prefer to make that judgment on your own? Wouldn't you prefer to at least have the option to view a .pdf natively?

Let it all out in the comments at Amazon's expense (which is technically your expense, if you've bought a Kindle or any other product from the company). You can't be banned in this thread, haters. So get mean.