Amazon Kindle DX discontinuedThe eBook Reader blog reports that, after first marking it down from $379 to $299, and not updating it for years, Amazon has quietly removed the Kindle DX from its Kindle family listings. It is now only available via third-party merchants, and there is no sign of any possible replacement.

It didn’t seem to me that there ever really was that much of a market for the DX. It was too big to be easily pocketable the way the smaller readers are, and too monochrome to be desirable for displaying things like textbooks. The Kindle Fire HD will boast the same screen size, but in color—just right for textbooks, magazines and other large-page applications. And at $299 for the 16GB Special Offers version, it will cost the same as the Fire’s sale price.

It seems as though e-reader momentum is starting to shift toward tablets, especially for larger screens. As I mentioned in my last piece, they might not do e-book reading as well as e-ink devices, but they beat the heck out of them as generalists.

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2 COMMENTS

  1. This is unfortunate, since there are specialized areas where documents come in a fixed size that’s too large to read easily on a coat-pocketable Kindle. Law is one. Court filings are on 8.5×11 paper. The sciences are another. Many papers end up as multicolumn PDFs on 8.5×11 or A4 paper. Being able to read them on a Kindles saves trees.

    That said, I get the impression that, at least in law, iPads and other large tablets have become the gadget of choice. Vastly more apps mean more tools to search through and markup documents. You can’t do much with a Kindle but read.

    That’s probably why Amazon wasn’t selling very many KindleDXs.

  2. Reading pdfs on an iPad is a joy, so the same should be true on the larger Fire when it is available if a good app is available for it. My favorite app on the iPad for pdfs is Goodreader. I have also used Goodreader for viewing historical maps while I was reading a book where they were useful to have. And I can use pdf tutorials on the iPad while I work through the software they refer to on my computer. There is so much you can do!

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