Last year, Amazon killed a number of its Kindle products in anticipation of the Kindle Fire HD launch. One of those killed products was the Kindle DX – a large-format text e-reader. Now it has appeared once again on Amazon’s storefront as mysteriously as it had disappeared all those months ago.
The Digital Reader reports that the Kindle DX is available once again for its usual price of $299. For that price, you get a 9.7-inch e-reader that displays text in large-format fonts for easy reading. In fact, some of our readers lamented its original passing saying that the device was better than others at displaying PDFs and manuals.
So, why is it back? That’s the funny thing – nobody knows. All Amazon is saying is that it’s “excited to offer customers this option.” Well, it’s obviously excited to make money, but why offer a device that it unceremoniously killed over six months ago? Was there unseen demand for the device in the time between its removal and its resurrection this week? It’s hard to say, and Amazon isn’t being exactly being helpful.
With all this in mind, it’s probably best that you pick one up now if you really need a 9.7-inch e-reader. You never know when Amazon will just outright kill it again without any warning. For all we know, Amazon could introduce a 10-inch Kindle Fire HD and kill off the DX once and for all. Granted, that wouldn’t be such a bad trade-off. The 8.9-inch Kindle Fire HD is already a pretty great tablet, and making it just a hair bigger sounds like natural progression to me.
Oh, one more thing – the return of the Kindle DX was made possible by the sacrifice of another. The Verge is reporting that the Kindle Keyboard was killed around the same time that the DX was brought back. It’s a good thing the Kindle DX has a keyboard, right?