Haha, yeah. I bought a Chinese textbook on Kindle and the Chinese characters were scanned. Worse, the scans were pasted into the wrong parts in some spots, mixing up phrases and translations, and they didn't zoom with the font size. Their Asian language support is atrocious, I guess.
The DX is so much better than the normal Kindle, why can't Amazon just wait and let the market develop? Given a few years, I think it would do just fine.
Right now I'm not upgrading until I see a DX formfactor, no matter what the new features are. I like my printed page the size of, well, printed pages.
The problem is that the DX is not a good Kindle from Amazon's perspective. Note that while you're requesting your "printed page" to be printed page size, they're focusing on a "book" that is book sized.
From Amazon's perspective, a great Kindle is something that you use extensively, carry with you everywhere, and buy many books on. There are very few books that Amazon sells that are seriously helped by the DX's larger screen, save maybe for someone who needs to crank the font way up.
The DX, I assume, is great for PDF's with formatting/figures that won't convert well (which the small Kindles are pretty bad at). But Amazon makes no money on you reading PDF's on your DX.
A DX with a great touch screen and a stylus could also make an outstanding replacement for paper that you write on. But again, Amazon won't make money for each page you scrawl.
Add to that the fact that the market for the DX is presumably significantly smaller, and you get where we are now. Amazon charges a lot for the DX because they need to actually profit from it, instead of relying on content sales. Amazon doesn't have a big incentive to improve the DX because it doesn't make them much money.
Maybe in the long run, they'll get around to it, especially if technology does get to the point where you can make really good lines on e-ink. Then maybe they'll push for the Kindle to be the digital piece of paper that everyone owns, and oh by the way, now that you can buy content from your paper, maybe that will be some very profitable paper for Amazon.
For me, code listings are too small on the small Kindles, even when the books are bought from Amazon. Also it's a bit distracting to me to turn the page as often as is required on the small Kindles, which fit much less words per page than a paperback.
I've given up on reading any technical books on any device. Even on an iPad it's a pain to try to read books that are formated with items that are not inline with the text.
Does anyone know why books are the size and shape that they are? Is it optimization over time for users or because it fits better in a truck pallet? Or something else? Suit pockets maybe?
Something interesting is that cultures with different sources of literary traditions have slightly different sizes and aspect ratios for what is considered a "normal" book size and shape. It doesn't vary too much, there are obvious physical constraints on how large or small or awkward reading technology can be, but it's different enough that it's noticable.
I was bartending during the Giants/Cowboys game, saw this ad and for a minute wasn't sure if I had seen a new KF or not. But if so, it looked crazy thin. Christmas 2012 looks to have a salvo of great devices going around this year
The latest four-way-controller ones are pretty good for refresh rate, I turned down the earlier kindles but am totally happy with this one. A couple of extra years development would seem to match up well with expectations of a faster refresh.
I just hope that they have a non-touch version (though I'm not willing to bet on it).
Then if they would add proper foreign language support (full CJK fonts, real vertical text layout, ruby support), maybe I could finally get a kindle!
Oh, and epub. An e-reader without good epub support is silly.
Who am I kidding... :(