Later today the folks at Amazon are holding an event to announce their new large screen Kindle DX. Rumor has it the new DX will have a new 9.7 inch screen, better support for PDFs and a better web browser. I have the first Kindle and absolutely love it – bought over 50 books for it and have a ton of fanfiction on it, tried the 2nd version and hated it. I don’t know enough about the new Kindle to pass judgment – I’ll order one and will play with it for a few weeks. But my initial gut reaction, based on the mockups – I don’t like it. I think if they make a larger Kindle that’d be great, but it needs to be wider and not simply “longer.”
The ideal size is 8 1/2 by 11 especially since the point of the new Kindle DX is to target the newspaper reading and college text book crowd. What good is having a longer but narrow screen going to do? Also navigating around the Kindle is a horrible experience, it’s a great device for reading from page to page, but nearly impossible to skip ahead and back to specific points – which is how people use Text Books. But we’ll see what they announce today. I’ll post a follow up after the Press Conference.