Site Map - skip to main content

Hacker Public Radio

Your ideas, projects, opinions - podcasted.

New episodes every weekday Monday through Friday.
This page was generated by The HPR Robot at


hpr1829 :: My "New" Used Kindle DX

I talk about my latest gadget, a used Kindle DX

<< First, < Previous, , Latest >>

Thumbnail of Jon Kulp
Hosted by Jon Kulp on Thursday, 2015-08-06 is flagged as Clean and is released under a CC-BY-SA license.
ebooks, ereaders, kindle, gadgets, reviews. 4.
The show is available on the Internet Archive at: https://archive.org/details/hpr1829

Listen in ogg, spx, or mp3 format. Play now:

Duration: 00:13:56

general.

I talk about my latest gadget, a used Kindle DX, which is a discontinued model with a 9.7 inch epaper screen. I talk about its features, limitations, how to navigate it, and I demonstrate its text-to-speech capabilities. Incidentally I really low-balled the original price of the Kindle DX. Looking around a little bit, I find that the original retail price was $479, which was then reduced to just under $400. Mine now seems like a bargain at $128 used.

Kindle DX


Comments

Subscribe to the comments RSS feed.

Comment #1 posted on 2015-08-07 15:16:51 by Fweeb

BQ Cervantes?

You mentioned that you were looking for an unaffiliated ereader. How about the BQ Cervantes[1]? It's a touch expensive, but it *is* unaffiliated and, as a bonus, the version I've linked to runs an open source stack. I don't have one, but I'm awfully tempted.

[1] https://store.bq.com/en/e-readers/cervantes

Comment #2 posted on 2015-08-07 16:31:12 by cybergrue

One thing you missed

Another good show Jon.
One thing about the Kindle DX that you missed is that it can display full size pdf documents without resizing them, or reflowing. It works great for technical pdfs, like scientific papers with embed graphics and graphs for example.
It can handle very large pdf documents but changing pages is very slowwww.

Also, it can display other formats as well, plain ASCII text for example.
On mine, there is an experimental features menu item that claims it can retrieve web pages (via cellular I think) I have never used this feature so I don't know if or how well it works.

The DX appears to have been an attempt at a professional version of the Kindle and appears to have features that were not on other kindles, which explains its price and short life.

Comment #3 posted on 2015-08-08 01:00:34 by Jon Kulp

good catch (PDFs)

you're totally right, I forgot to mention this. This is probably because I don't really like to read PDFs even on this, although they are certainly much better on the DX than on the smaller Kindles. I put a few scholarly article PDFs on there as well as a couple of musical scores, and they're not bad, but I think a tablet is better for PDFs. I seem to recall that there were two or three options for viewing the PDFs, including cutting off all the white space around the text, which would be a huge help except for most of the articles I read have a tiny footer across the very bottom that completely ruins this feature.

Comment #4 posted on 2015-08-08 01:02:37 by Jon Kulp

Cervantes Reader

thanks for the heads up on this. I have not heard of the Cervantes reader but it looks great. Doesn't look like I can easily get one in the United States, though.

Leave Comment

Note to Verbose Commenters
If you can't fit everything you want to say in the comment below then you really should record a response show instead.

Note to Spammers
All comments are moderated. All links are checked by humans. We strip out all html. Feel free to record a show about yourself, or your industry, or any other topic we may find interesting. We also check shows for spam :).

Provide feedback
Your Name/Handle:
Title:
Comment:
Anti Spam Question: What does the letter P in HPR stand for?
Are you a spammer?
Who is the host of this show?
What does HPR mean to you?