The new Kindle DX: Closer to comic ready, but…

by Glenn Hauman on May 6th, 2009 at 11:16 pm
Posted In: News

Amazon has released the Kindle DX, the 2.0 version of their e-book reader. And you already know if it works for books, but we know the really important question– is it the holy grail for reading comics?

Well, the screen’s bigger. It’s bigger than the average tankoubon manga page (5 x 7.5 inches) but smaller than the average US comic page. The screen auto-rotates when you rotate it, so it zooms nicely. And miracle of miracles, it has native PDF support. It holds over twice as much data as the original Kindle.

But. It’s still not color, it’s 16 gray levels. It still has all of the Digital Rights Management that allows Amazon to turn your machine into a paperweight if it so decides. There aren’t a lot of comic books available for it yet. And at $489 for the device alone, that’s a few months of comics buying right there.

So I’m torn. It might be the perfect manga reader, but I’m not sure it’s there yet for most of the books in America. I’m looking forward to getting my hands on it to give it a full test, but I still don’t think I’m giving up my MacBook Pro and ComicBookLover yet.

I still think Joy Of Tech has the best take on it so far…