I talk about my latest gadget, a used Kindle DX, which is a discontinued model with a 9.7 inch epaper screen. I talk about its features, limitations, how to navigate it, and I demonstrate its text-to-speech capabilities. Incidentally I really low-balled the original price of the Kindle DX. Looking around a little bit, I find that the original retail price was $479, which was then reduced to just under $400. Mine now seems like a bargain at $128 used.
You mentioned that you were looking for an unaffiliated ereader. How about the BQ Cervantes[1]? It's a touch expensive, but it *is* unaffiliated and, as a bonus, the version I've linked to runs an open source stack. I don't have one, but I'm awfully tempted.
[1] https://store.bq.com/en/e-readers/cervantes
Comment #2 posted on 2015-08-07 16:31:12 by cybergrue
One thing you missed
Another good show Jon.
One thing about the Kindle DX that you missed is that it can display full size pdf documents without resizing them, or reflowing. It works great for technical pdfs, like scientific papers with embed graphics and graphs for example.
It can handle very large pdf documents but changing pages is very slowwww.
Also, it can display other formats as well, plain ASCII text for example.
On mine, there is an experimental features menu item that claims it can retrieve web pages (via cellular I think) I have never used this feature so I don't know if or how well it works.
The DX appears to have been an attempt at a professional version of the Kindle and appears to have features that were not on other kindles, which explains its price and short life.
Comment #3 posted on 2015-08-08 01:00:34 by Jon Kulp
good catch (PDFs)
you're totally right, I forgot to mention this. This is probably because I don't really like to read PDFs even on this, although they are certainly much better on the DX than on the smaller Kindles. I put a few scholarly article PDFs on there as well as a couple of musical scores, and they're not bad, but I think a tablet is better for PDFs. I seem to recall that there were two or three options for viewing the PDFs, including cutting off all the white space around the text, which would be a huge help except for most of the articles I read have a tiny footer across the very bottom that completely ruins this feature.
Comment #4 posted on 2015-08-08 01:02:37 by Jon Kulp
Cervantes Reader
thanks for the heads up on this. I have not heard of the Cervantes reader but it looks great. Doesn't look like I can easily get one in the United States, though.
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