Amazon Wins First Kindle Patent; Bigger Screen Expected Soon 50
An anonymous reader writes "One day before Amazon is scheduled to unveil its widescreen Kindle aimed at newspaper readers, the e-commerce giant has been awarded its first US patent for an e-book reader. The new patent, D591,741, is a design patent which protects the look and feel of the Kindle shell, not for fundamental technologies. Those patents are mostly held by E Ink Corp., which makes the 'liquidless paper' display. Sony, IBM, and the Discovery cable TV network also have e-book patents. Amazon, though the leading e-book seller, has none, but the patent award indicates they've applied for at least four recently." Also in Kindle news, PC World has a brief article up on the larger-screen Kindle DX (expected to launch Wednesday), including pictures first spotted on Engadget.
Re:PDF support (Score:5, Informative)
PDFs are awesome and all, but they REALLY want to be 8.5x11. The whole point storing a document in the PDF format is to retain formatting regardless of viewing platform. The Kindle 1 and 2 depend on the ability to freely reflow text at need. The point of a PDF is to disallow the adjustment of text flow. These things are fundamentally incompatible, and what you get are halfass workarounds like the Sony Reader's tedious zooming in and out, or the Kindle's demand to convert to a more friendly format. (If you send a document of scanned pages through the Kindle conversion system, you get those page on your kindle... at 600x800, and a 6" diagonal. Not big enough to be readable. They've recently changed it so that it chops each page in half, so it's readable but on documents with columns you're flipping back and forth between two pages.)
What you will see is good PDF support on this new student Kindle, since it can just display the damn PDF and doesn't have to worry about the resizing things to make them readable.