After less than three months of ownership, my Kindle DX decided to die, but at least it has done it artfully:
It isn’t quite dead. Rather it’s in a perpetual catatonic state. It will happily accept power and will turn its single, dimmed eye yellow until it had its fill. And it will sometimes show a glimmer of hope in the form of a flickering pixel or two (equivalent to REM I guess).
I wish I could send it back, but assuming that the shipping costs aren’t prohibitive, I’m not sure if the process would work for me, considering that I obtained it through a mail forwarding service.
Anyways, my Kindle 2 still survives. That’s some comfort.
What was good
The only reason I bought the DX was to read technical, large-format books on it, which proved to be a mixed bag. The instant gratification of wireless delivery was the biggest plus for me, especially considering that I have to wait an average of ten days for physical book shipments to actually arrive.
The convenience of carrying around a small library was also a big win. Reading The Economist with the morning coffee, catching up on finishing Pro ASP.NET MVC 2 during breaks, and finally ending the day with some Asimov after watching the semi-daily dose of The Daily Show—all that was nothing but pure reading bliss.
What was bad
But the main reason I bought the DX was for programming books, which looked ridiculously ill-formatted on the diminutive Kindle 2. The DX works better, but not by much. I’ve tried books from O’reilly Media, Apress, and Manning. And while the content was readable, the formatting was lacking. Code blocks are always rendered as pictures, which often look blurry and break the flow of normal text in weird ways.
Using PDFs instead of the Kindle’s native AZW files fixes all formatting issues, but even on the DX the text ends up looking like fine print: readable, but not without effort. And many charts and diagrams don’t render at all.
Now what?
I would have been tempted to get another Kindle DX had my experience been more positive. For technical books, it’s barely adequate. For everything else, its smaller sibling is a better fit, both in one’s budget and one’s messenger bag.
Now I’m stuck trying to find an alternative. Reading on my main computer at work or at home is not an option. If The Shallows is to be believed (and it does offer some very compelling evidence), I fall into ADHD mode as soon as I’m seated in front of anything that has an email client and a browser.
My netbook is no good because I feel as if I’m viewing content through a peephole whenever I use it for more than half an hour.
All Tablet PCs that I have tried over the years—all three of them in fact—were power-challenged and carrying them in one hand for any extended amount of time required the stamina of a one-handed SAS operative trekking across the Falklands.
Which leaves the iPad. More flexible, probably less ADHD-inducing than a full PC, has half-decent battery life, not that expensive compared to the DX, and—according to at least one report—offers a better reading experience than the Kindle.
But then again, I would be hovering dangerously close to becoming something like this.
Risky.
