Kindle DX - Almost There

On Wednesday of this week, Amazon announced the Kindle DX. I point this out because this may be the first e-book reader that's in the running for suckering me out of my hard-earned money.

I'd say that my work life is split 60-40 between research (finding out what's going on in the machine learning community) and development (writing software that brings these ideas together). It's not easy keeping on top of all that's going on in these two radically different communities.

For the research side of things, you have to keep up-to-date on what's going on in the literature. This means tracking down journal articles and preprints, and that means lots of visits to Google Scholar and plenty of downloaded PDFs. Very recently, I came across Zotero which helps me to keep track of all my notes, references, and the electronic copies of the papers themselves. Once Zotero supports collaboration amongst research groups (so we can point out papers to our interested colleagues and share our reviews), I'd say that I could almost go all-electronic on the research front.

On the software-development side of my profession, you have as much (or maybe even more) to keep current on, but there the reading material is very different. I stopped buying computer books a while ago, as most of them are obsolete within a few years. Programming languages, frameworks, and software architectures are such a rapidly moving target these days. That's why I'm a subscriber to Oreilly's Safari books online. It's a great way to read recent software and technology books without needlessly cluttering your physical bookshelves.

It's safe to say then that most of my reading material is either on a webpage or in a PDF document. With all this digitial media, I'd be great if I could read this content electronically as well. In many cases, I do, but it can be kind of a pain. I'd prefer to read in my favorite armchair, on the couch, or out on the balcony on a nice day. My development laptop is too clunky, uncomfortable, and hot to use while laying down or for long periods of time. My cheap little netbook has such a small screen that sites like Safari aren't easy to read. And I don't really want to haul either out on to the balcony to enjoy the weather while I read. And none of these devices match the effective resolution of the Kindles electronic ink.

So, previous models of the Kindle have appealed to me, but they've failed in the faithful display of PDFs and other websites (so I've read; I've never laid hands on any of them myself). That's been a no-start right there. This new Kindle though, promises native PDF rendering (no conversion process needed) and a bigger screen that's not too far off from the printable area of a letter-sized document. It's pricier than any of the previous models, and I'm not convinced that it's enough of a leap forward for me to take the plunge.

So, here's my wishlist for the future Kindle DX2 (or whatever it ends up being named) in some vain hope that some of it will come to fruition:

• Have a tablet-screen so I can hand-annotate PDFs. Most of the notes I make are about specific equations from the papers I read (e.g., re-deriving them in the margins), and no keyboard (physical or virtual) is going to be convenient enough for me to use.
  
  Correlary: The DX does a good job of minimizing the amount of space occupied by the keyboard. Now go one step further and eliminate it.
  
  
• Make sure that Google Reader is supported for the built-in browser (so I can read my RSS feeds). For that matter, I'd like GMail to just work as well.
  
  Correlary: I'm not interested in paying to subscribe to blogs on my putative Kindle. I'm going to spend most of my time reading within a few meters of one of my own WiFi access points, and I can plan ahead if I need to hit the road. So, just get rid of that whole Sprint/Whispernet thing, and then you don't have to worry about the bandwidth.
  
  
• Can you do a little better than $490? For such a single-function device, that's a steep price. I think you've got get below the netbook market (around the $300 range now). I suspect that dropping the whole Sprint contract might help with that.
  
  
• Any chance of opening up a development kit for a Firefox-like plugin environment (or maybe something like an iPhone App Store)? I'd like to see Zotero end up on the Kindle in some fashion, and I doubt that there's sufficient incentive for Amazon to roll that in on their own.
  
  
• Provide a search capability that indexes the contents of the PDFs. Once I've loaded up this sucker with all my articles and books, I'm going to need it.
  

Amazon, I know that there are a lot of scientists and researchers like me out there that would love to keep their entire library of journal articles and reference materials on a Kindle-like device, and I think if you roll in some of these features, you're going to see us line up to throw our cash at your feet. At least I probably would.