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Amazon unveils the big-screen Kindle DX

Tags:
Jeff Bezos,
Kindle

Caroline McCarthy CNET News

Published: 07 May 2009 09:45 BST

Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos unveiled the much-anticipated large-screen Kindle e-reader in a lecture hall on Wednesday at New York's Pace University.

Called the Kindle DX, the new device is geared toward readers of personal and professional documents, newspapers and magazines — and textbooks, a potentially huge target market.

The debut of the bigger Kindle was no secret: rumours of a larger-screen Kindle had been around for quite some time, and concrete reports began to surface earlier this week.

According to Amazon's Kindle DX page, the device has the following:

A 9.7-inch display with 16 shades of grey (the standard Kindle has a six-inch display)
Capacity to hold up to 3,500 books, periodicals and documents
An auto-rotating screen to show either portrait or landscape views
A built-in PDF reader
3G wireless network support with no monthly fees or annual contracts
Battery capacity to "read for days without charging"
Text-to-speech abilities to read publications aloud

Several of those features are shared with the current Kindle 2, but several are unique to the Kindle DX: the native PDF reader that does not require the files to be converted, the rotating display, the 3,500-publication capacity compared to 1,500 for the Kindle 2, and of course the larger screen.

"You never have to pan, you never have to zoom, you never have to scroll, you just see the documents," Bezos said.

The Kindle DX retails for $489 (£325; the standard Kindle is $359), and is available for pre-orders now on Amazon. It will ship this summer.

As expected, education is a big market for the bigger Kindle. Amazon has partnered with textbook manufacturers Pearson, Cengage Learning and Wiley to bring textbooks to the Kindle — which Bezos says make up 60 percent of the textbook market — as well as several US universities to launch a Kindle DX pilot program this autumn.

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Photos: A look at Amazon's Kindle DX

"We're going to get students with smaller backpacks, less load, easier access," said Bezos, who then introduced Case Western Reserve University president Barbara Snyder. She said that the university would be seeing how study habits and the learning process change with the use of Kindles as textbook replacements.

Many predicted that the Kindle DX would be geared in part towards helping out the struggling newspaper industry, and indeed, three newspapers will also be testing out the Kindle DX this summer in exchange for future product development help. The publications participating are The New York Times, The Boston Globe (owned by the New York Times Company), and The Washington Post.

Arthur Sulzberger Jr, chairman of the New York Times Company, said that the Times and the Globe will first be available on the Kindle DX in markets where home delivery is not available.

The Kindle DX showcases "our commitment to reinvention and to taking full advantage of digital media," Sulzberger said, "which are providing a compelling laboratory for entrepreneurs, for technologists, and of course for journalists. The new Kindle DX is an important milestone in the convergence between print and digital."

"Newspapers have been an absolute bestseller on Kindle," Bezos said. "People love waking up in the morning to find that their New York Times, their Washington Post, their Wall Street Journal have been 'automagically' delivered overnight. They like the fact that when they travel their subscription follows them around."

In addition to launching the new device, Jeff Bezos hailed the rise of the Kindle phenomenon in general, and its lofty goal of working toward "every book ever printed, in any language, all available in less than 60 seconds".

"Eighteen months ago, we launched Kindle, and at the time we had 90,000 books available for Kindle. [We had] 230,000 books just three months ago when we launched Kindle 2," Bezos said. Now, the count is 275,000 books. "We've added another 45,000 books in just the last three months. We're actually accelerating."