Understand the E-book Revolution: What Kindle DX Digital Books are Worth Your Time

Understand the E-book Revolution: What Kindle DX Digital Books are Worth Your Time
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Advantages of a Kindle DX

The Kindle DX offers owners a big advantage over standard Kindle e-book readers. This e-book reader is 9.7-inches, 3.7-inches bigger than the standard Kindle. The downfall to purchasing the larger version of the Kindle is the price, $379 as of May 2011, compared to $189 or less for the smaller models. While the larger format makes the device perfect for bigger items, such as newspapers and magazines, there are still areas you need to watch out for.

Keep Away from Graphic-Heavy Books

One of the big selling points for Kindle DX digital books are the larger screens, promising an ideal display for graphic-rich books. While the images in the reader are larger and clearer than the smaller version of the Kindle, they are still nowhere near as good as you can get from a real book. The first problem is that the images, despite an impressive 1200 x 824 pixels, are presented in 16-level gray scale. Without color, the Kindle DX falls short when purchasing the books for the artwork.

One example of a book to avoid purchasing from Amazon.com as an e-book is Nikki Sixx’s “This is Gonna Hurt.” This book features photography from Nikki Sixx but the quality of the e-book distorts the beauty of the photography. However, the print copy of the book is filled with the photography just the way Nikki Sixx intended. When looking for art books or books with large colorful images, it is always good to head to the book store and see how the print copies look before dishing out for the e-book version.

Enjoy All the Best Sellers at a Discounted Price

Whenever a popular new book hits shelves, Amazon typically offers reasonable discounts on the Kindle versions as compared to the print editions of the book. An example is Tina Fey’s 2011 biography “Bossypants.” The retail price of the book when released was $26.99 and Amazon sells it for $13.97 but the Kindle DX edition of “Bossypants” costs $12.99 as of May 2011. It also offers buyers a chance to own a large number of books, up to 3,500 storable on the device itself, without taking up space on bookshelves. These discounted e-books run anywhere from $1 savings up to $10 or more off a popular book’s cover price.

Amazon.com offers a number of free e-books for the Kindle DX that owners can take advantage of. Amazon offers owners the chance to download free classical books, perfect to brush up on the great stories of yesteryear. Titles like “Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” Jane Austin’s “Pride and Prejudice,” Lewis Carroll’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” and Leo Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” are all available for free download for the Kindle.

There are also four sites that allow downloading of free e-books to the Kindle DX that Amazon recommends. These sites are archive.org, openlibrary.org, gutenberg.org and manybooks.net. Open Library allows an owner to download the book directly to the Kindle DX while the other three sites ask you to download the e-book to your computer and then drag the files onto your Kindle through a USB connection.

References

All information from author’s personal experience.

Product images from Amazon.com