Amazon's large screen ebook reader, the Kindle DX, will be available in the UK from Jan 19
The Kindle DX has a 9.7in eInk screen, and is designed predominantly for reading electronic versions of newspapers, magazines, textbooks and other large-format publications, as well as standard ebooks. It uses the 3G mobile phone network to instantly download books on the go.The device, which went on sale in the United States last May, can now be pre-ordered from the Amazon.com website by British consumers for $489 (£305). As with the regular Kindle, which has been available in the UK since October, British DX users will need to download books from the Amazon US website and pay in dollars.
Differences in international copyright agreements also mean that some books sold through Amazon.com will be unavailable to British consumers. Amazon said it would open a UK-specific Kindle store in the coming months, but that the current arrangement was the most efficient way of ensuring the Kindle range was available to a wider variety of users.
The Kindle DX, which can store up to 3,500 books on its 3.3GB of internal memory, has been touted by some as a replacement for traditional printed school and university textbooks.
Jeff Bezos, Amazon's founder and chief executive, said that highly formatted books "shine on the Kindle DX", and that the device was idea for looking at charts, tables and graphs.
But students and scholars at Princeton University, who were given 50 Kindle DX devices last October containing their course notes for the term, criticised the DX, with one calling it "a poor excuse of an academic tool".
While most Princeton users acknowledged the benefits of the new technology, a significant number said the DX was difficult to use.
"I hate to sound like a Luddite," Aaron Horvath, who is studying civil society and public policy at Princeton, told the university paper, "[but] 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’ [of the Kindle DX] have been rendered useless.”