Episode: 1829
Title: HPR1829: My "New" Used Kindle DX
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1829/hpr1829.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 09:50:38

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This is HPR episode 1829 entitled My New Used Kindle DX.
It is hosted by John Kulp and is about 14 minutes long.
The summer is, I talk about my latest gadget, a used Kindle DX.
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Hey everybody, this is John Kulp and Lafayette Louisiana and I'm recording another podcast
about e-book readers today.
Recently, I had a birthday and since I may degenerate this way, I decided I wanted another
Kindle.
I already had a Kindle Paper White and you may have heard my recent episode about the
Kindle Touch that I picked up at a pawn shop.
And as if that were not enough, I decided I wanted another Kindle.
This one though is substantially different from the other two and as much as it's really
really big.
I had seen one of my students this past year is someone who had low vision problems and
one day in class, she pulled out a massive Kindle and I had never seen anything like it,
but I came to find out later that it is a Kindle DX.
The Kindle DX has been discontinued, at least that's my understanding.
It was kind of expensive to begin with and it probably didn't sell all that many.
I think the original price was in the $250 or $300 range and it's probably that expensive
because the screen is very, very large.
It's essentially the same size screen as a 10 inch tablet, like the iPad or Galaxy Pad
or something like that.
I don't know all the tablets there are out there, but it's a large screen but it's e-paper.
It is not one of the glowing kinds of screens and so I thought I wanted to get one and I
found one on the Amazon Marketplace or maybe it's refurbished or something, but it was
only $128 rather than the $200 or more that most of them went for.
One of them, some crazy person was trying to sell one for something like $800 and I don't
know who would ever be silly enough to pay that much for one, but anyway, I found one
for $128 and so I bought it and it came in the mail and it wouldn't turn on because the
battery was completely drained so once I charged it all the way up, it turned on, excuse
me.
The one technical issue that I've had with this thing is that the 3G does not work.
It allegedly comes with worldwide 3G that will connect anywhere and allow you to get
books, but the 3G just doesn't work and so this is not really a huge issue for me.
I just side-load everything using Caliber instead.
One cool thing about the DX is that it actually has an on-off switch which seems to work
a little better than the one on the Kindle Touch and the Kindle Paper White.
It's a little slider switch on the top.
It has an audio output jack on the top edge right next to the slider power switch also
and that should give you some indication that it has some audio capabilities as well.
I've already tried the text to speech and it works pretty well.
Actually, maybe I can demonstrate that right now.
I'm not sure what the volume is like, but let me, right now it's open on one of my daughter's
books.
She kind of took, she kind of commandeered this thing when it came in and so my son
has commandeered the Kindle Touch and I'm basically still using my Kindle Paper White.
What am I looking for here?
I'm sorry.
Let's see, is it?
How do you turn on the...
Oh wait, wait, I remember.
Okay, so this thing is a little bit different from the Kindle Touch and the Kindle Paper White
and as much as the screen is not touch sensitive.
You have to do everything by pushing physical buttons.
There is along the right hand side of the screen there is a home button which takes you
to the home screen.
There is a left arrow and a much larger right arrow like twice the size of the left arrow
and that is the one that will take you to the next page in the book.
Below that there is a menu button and then a back button and right situated in between
the menu and the back button is a toggle which can be toggled left right up and down and
it can be pressed to select things and this is how you navigate around when you're either
choosing what book to read or trying to select text to highlight it or make annotations
and stuff like that.
Then across the bottom of the Kindle, underneath the 9.7-inch screen there is a physical
Quirty Keyboard and this is how you have to turn on the text to speech.
You push the little AA button which takes you to the preferences and it shows you the
various font sizes that you could choose.
I'm going to use the toggle switch to go down and click turn on text to speech and we
should hear it.
Start to speak here in just a moment.
I'll put it up.
I'll turn down into the water almost up to her gunnels.
The barge is rebounded and then rocked from side to side, sending waves washing out to
the banks of the river and her skipper running angrily toward them, brandishing a longboat
hook.
Go away.
I'm going to turn the text to speech back off.
That's an example of text to speech reading from my daughter's book.
At first I had some trouble trying to find the books I wanted to read and stuff because
since you can't touch the screen to select what you want, you have to navigate in other
ways and this is not really a problem if you only have a few books but this device thankfully
has a very large storage capacity.
Something like four gigs where my Kindle Paper White has only, I don't know, 1.8 gigs
or something like that and so I have a lot of books on here, something like 400 books
right now and navigating through that many books by hitting the next page button over
and over through the list of books can be tedious.
However, I found that if you are sorting all of your books by either author or title,
you can go down to the physical keyboard and type the first letter of the author or the
title and then it will ask you if you want to skip to the titles or authors beginning
with that letter and you just press the toggle button to say yes and it will take you
right there so you can skip many pages and go right where you want to go quickly.
It's actually pretty fast, I don't like the way it searches, it seems like you should
be able to search through all your titles or authors and quickly find the one you want
but when you do this instead of just searching for titles or authors, it searches for all
instances of the word that you searched for, excuse me, my phone is going off here, my
phone is going, my dad calling me for some reason, I'll call him back in a little while
and in the meantime, I'm going to silence my phone, sorry about that, y'all.
Real live recording, I'm going to go ringtone silent and that should keep that from happening
again.
Normally I remember to do that before I ever start recording but this time I did not.
So anyway, that's how you go around and find the books that you want to read and likewise
when you're inside a book, if you press the menu option then you have to use the toggle
switch to go down and you choose table of contents and then you have to use the toggle
to search for the chapter that you want and so forth.
Now the other big difference between this and the Kindles that I already had is that it
does not support the AZW3 file format which is now the current standard format for Kindles
by one of the new Kindles or any new Kindle book and it by default, well it actually,
it knows what kind of Kindle you have when you sync up your account with the Kindle store
and so it will send you the right format for the book but by default most Kindles now
use AZW3.
Well I found when I tried to push some books over to this Kindle in Calibur that it had
to convert everything to Moby format before it would go over there.
I tried just dragging an AZW3 file onto the Kindle and then reading it but it never even
found it so it has to be the Moby format which is not a big deal.
In Calibur it senses what kind of Kindle that you have put in there and so if you try
to put the wrong file format on the Kindle it will prompt you and ask do you want to
convert this before you stick it on there and you can just say yes and it will do the
right thing.
So I've got a bunch of books on here, 394 books right now all converted over to the
Moby format.
That takes a while if you get that many books but it's not that big a deal, I don't know
half an hour or an hour and it will be done.
So anyway I'm really really happy with this thing, it's especially good for reading
technical books like the text books that I use for my classes because you can see so
much more on a page and it's also really a whole lot better if you're going to read a
computer book, programming book, I've got a bash scripting book and a Python book and
stuff like that on here.
And the larger screen makes it so that the code examples do not break lines the way they
do on the smaller screen.
So in that sense it's much better.
If I'm really going to be using a computer book then I probably would read it on my laptop.
That's the one circumstance where I would read a book on my laptop instead of on a dedicated
reading device is if I want to be able to copy and paste code examples from the book.
Otherwise I'd always prefer to read it on a dedicated reader.
The other big advantage for this, the really large screen is for people who like my student
have low vision problems and they need to make the font really big.
Now you can make the font huge on one of the Kindle paper whites or Kindle touches.
But if you do that, suddenly you can only see about eight or ten words per page, whereas
on this the screen is so large that even if you make the font huge you can see more or
less a decent amount of text on a page.
So I think this version of the Kindle was especially popular with people with low vision.
Kind of ashamed that they don't make it anymore but I don't know.
That makes it so that you can get used ones for fairly reasonable prices.
So I don't know that there's anything else I need to say about this.
Oh, it also does not have a backlight.
So you have to have a sufficient light source shining on it to be able to, right now I'm
sitting in my office at work and I've got the fluorescent overhead lights and I can see
it perfectly.
You can also just sit under a lamp and read it just fine or shine a light on it.
Sit out in the direct sunlight looks great.
But the Kindle paper white, one of the big killer features of that is that it has a built
in backlight and so you can read it in any condition without having to have a light source.
All right, I guess that's enough.
I will talk to you guys some other time.
Eventually I want to get different e-readers by different manufacturers like that.
I would like to have a cobo or a nook paper.
My kids both have nook colors but those are more like tablets and I prefer the e-paper type
things.
So one of the original nooks or one of the cobo devices and I have a dream one day
of there being an open kind of piece of e-reader hardware that is not tied down to any one
bookstore or anything like that.
So far I don't think such a thing exists.
Anyway, that's it.
I will talk to you guys some other time.
Bye.
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