by Sandra M
As I am positive other reviews here will attest, the Kindle DX is in other respects a stunning & brilliant machine. In case you require to read PDFs, & have no desire to annotate or highlight them, then this would be a very satisfying tool. & in case you only require to annotate and/or highlight books (& can find the books you require in the Kindle store & can afford to buy them!), then the DX will be a brilliant piece of equipment to own. But in case you are a typical student, academic or professional who needs to interact together with your documents (& not read them), & are looking for something that will replace the necessity to print documents or read them on your computer, the DX basically does not fit the bill. Wait for the next product, or for Amazon to update their firmware with respectable support for PDFs & other document types. I will be mailing my Kindle back to Amazon tomorrow.
As a grad student who is worn out of printing out scores of journal articles or straining my eyes (& sucking battery power) reading them on a standard computer screen, I have been eagerly watching the evolution of e-book devices waiting for that would meet the needs of academics & professionals who are constantly reading, highlighting, & annotating documents & books. Because Amazon has marketed the Kindle DX as the e-reader for academics & professionals, highlighting its large screen & native PDF support, I finally thought that this was a product suitable for types like me & forked out the hundred dollars for the DX. Alas, on receiving the Kindle yesterday in the mail, it did not take long to recognize that this machine is not the "answer" that I had hoped it would be. The reason is simple: no highlighting or annotating PDFs, Word documents, & other personal documents. It did not even occur to me to inquire, before purchasing the DX, whether highlighting & annotating PDFs & Word docs was feasible. After all, can basically acquire free application that allows to do this on a computer (e.g. Skim for Macs), & in the Kindle DX press conference Amazon made a large deal about bringing reality to paperless workplaces, putting an finish to the method of printing out document after document. Well, surely of the major reasons people print out documents is so that they can mark on them with underlinings, highlights, & notes. & given that cannot do that for PDFs & other documents on a Kindle DX, Amazon's sales pitch is misleading: somebody who needs to interact with documents in the way typical of academics & professionals will still require to print out those documents (or make due on an eye-straining & power-consuming computer). Not only is it impossible to add an annotation to a specific passage in a PDF or Word document, cannot add any annotations whatsoever, even at the page level (or document level, for that matter). Clipping/highlighting support is also absent. This is frankly unacceptable for a product marketed as the Kindle for students & professionals.
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