Amazon.com has debuted a new version of its Kindle e-Reader, with a bigger screen, heftier price tag and a target market of newspaper enthusiasts and college kids looking to save money on textbooks.
CEO Jeff Bezos unveiled the Amazon Kindle DX on Wednesday. It will cost $489 (the smaller Kindle 2 goes for $359), he said, and will ship this summer.
The larger screen – 9.7 inches, as a matter of fact – is geared toward making the device more useful when reading newspapers and textbooks – two markets Amazon is actively pursuing.
"You never have to pan, you never have to zoom, you never have to scroll, you just see the documents," Bezos said.
Bezos announced partnerships with the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Boston Globe, among others, to bring their content to the Kindle on a monthly subscription basis. The move is seen as a boon for the ailing newspaper industry by some, a Hail Mary pass for print publishing by others.
But the new $500 device will also offer titles Pearson, Wiley and Cengage, which are textbook publishers. And textbooks make up what some estimate to be 60 percent of book sales. Amazon, Bezos said, will work with universities on digital textbook programs for their students.
The Kindle DX has enough capacity to hold up to 3,500 items, has an auto-rotating screen, built-in PDF reader and, like the Kindle 2, a text-to-speech function. It also, like the Kindle 2, has 3G connectivity from underlying carrier Sprint-Nextel Corp. (free and transparent to users), but no browser as previously rumored.
