Hasta La Gadget!

It’s still an elusive target for our old friend Mr. Blurrycam, but We just got some basic specs on the new, decidedly more newspaper- and college textbook-friendly Amazon Kindle DX. Here’s what we know: it’s got a 9.7-inch display (as opposed to the current six-inch unit), a long-requested built-in PDF reader, and the ability to add annotations in addition to notes and highlights — whatever that means. We’re also hearing that New York Times will be offering a $9.95 / month subscription, a little lower than the current $13.99. Honestly, that all sounds to us like this really is just a Kindle with a larger screen, not the newspaper savior it’s being hyped as, but ol’ Jeffy B. might still have surprises in store, so we’ll see. Seriously, can’t Wednesday just hurry up and get here already?

Update: Looks like Mssr. BC decided to throw down — check out some pics in the gallery!

Update 2: Some more details care of the Wall Street Journal. Chief information officer for Cleveland-based Case Western Reserve University — the college whose president will be taking the stage with Jeff Bezos — Lev Gonick said select students are being issued the new, larger screen Kindles (doesn’t specify DX) in the fall semester with pre-installed textbooks for chemistry, computer science and a freshman seminar. Five other universities including Pace, Princeton, Reed, Arizona State, and Darden School at the University of Virginia are also said to be signed up for the trial. As for the new details on the device itself, the report states it’s got a more functional web browser, with no word on how that’ll jibe with Whispernet.

Filed under: Handhelds

Amazon Kindle DX to feature 9.7-inch display? Update: Pictures! originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 04 May 2009 22:11:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Amazon is almost certain to announce a large-screen Kindle on Wednesday.

In the world of e-book readers, that’s huge. But if Apple fulfills expectations and releases a tablet-style computer later this year, it’s going to render the Kindle — no matter what screen size — almost instantly moot.

Amazon’s Kindle is far and away the most popular e-book reader; Amazon probably sold half a million last year and may sell a million Kindle 2’s this year. Yet the Kindle’s 6-inch screen, while impressively readable and crisp, is only slightly larger than a 3″ x 5″ index card. That’s why many magazine and newspaper publishers are excited about the prospect of a larger Kindle — let’s call it the “Kindle XL.” Even if it’s not as large as Plastic Logic’s promised 8.5″ x 11″ screen (due in early 2010), a larger screen would provide lots more room to display the day’s news, attractively laid-out feature stories, and, of course, advertisements.

Textbook publishers — who may be Amazon’s true target market, if the speculations of our own Charlie Sorrel as well as Om Malik are correct — may have even more to be happy about. The $9.8 billion textbook market is a prime example of the slowness, stupidity and waste of paper publishing. Plus, students would welcome the chance to ditch backbreaking tonnage and carry a thin, lightweight e-book reader instead. Amortized over the four or five years of a typical college education, even a $500 or $600 reader would be a reasonable expense. UPDATE 3:30pm Pacific: According to the Wall Street Journal, six universities will be offering their students e-textbooks on the large-screen Kindle.

But all this pales in comparison with what an Apple tablet could do. Rumors earlier this year suggested that Apple is working on a larger version of the iPhone with a 9 or 10-inch touchscreen, rather than a tablet-style MacBook. More recently, BusinessWeek cited anonymous sources suggesting that Apple and Verizon would soon release an iPhone-like “media pad” with a larger screen.

Imagine that the “media pad” includes a screen two to four times the size of the iPhone’s 3.5-inch (2″ x 3″) screen, Wi-Fi connectivity, the ability to run software from the App Store and a full web browser.

The usefulness of a device like that would instantly trump that of any e-book reader, even if the battery life is poor and the screen less readable than an e-ink screen. That’s because a simple, easy-to-use tablet would be able to do anything the e-book reader could (display the text of books using an app like Stanza, which Amazon recently acquired) plus it would have access to 40,000 apps and billions of web pages. Its screen would be able to display color, and it would undoubtedly let you access e-mail, IM and other apps that people want.

By contrast, e-book readers are good at basically one thing: Storing and displaying monochrome text and simple graphics. While the Kindle 2 has a web browser, it’s all but useless for even the most basic web activities.

Make no mistake: There are many more people who would be interested in a general-purpose tablet than in an e-book reader. Sure, the majority of them would probably use it to download bikini photos of Evangeline Lilly while watching Lost on the big screen instead of re-reading Proust.

But if the PC and smartphone industries are any guide, people will opt for a well-designed multipurpose device over a special-purpose gadget every time, even if the latter does a few things much better. Already, there are more people reading e-books on the iPhone using Stanza alone (more than one million) than on the Kindle.

We don’t know whether Apple will release a tablet or not. But if it does, its sales will make the Kindle’s million units look like a rounding error.

See Also:

• Will Anybody Buy the New Large-Format Kindle?
• A Reader the Kindle Should Fear: Plastic Logic
• Kindle 2’s Fuzzy Fonts Have Users Seeing Red
• Wired.com Review: Kindle 2 Brings E-Books Closer to Nirvana

Illustration of an imaginary iPhone tablet: Flickr/vernhart

Looks like the rumor of a new larger Kindle is true. Amazon just sent us an invitation to a press conference scheduled for Wednesday, May 6 at 10:30am ET. You know what Amazon does at press events? It launches new Kindles!

As noted by Peter Kafka over at All Things Digital, the location of the Amazon event — Pace University — is the historic, 19th century HQ to the New York Times which is said to be partnering with Amazon on the larger Kindle. That makes for a perfect symbolic bridge from old to new media. We’ll have to wait and see if newspaper subscribers can be lured across.

Update: We have a reliable tip that Barbara Snyder, president of Case Western Reserve University, and Arthur Sulzberger, top man at the New York Times will join Amazon’s Jeff Bezos on stage Wednesday. So it looks like a new Kindle focused on textbooks and newspapers is a lock.

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

Amazon press event Wednesday: See you and the bigger Kindle then originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 04 May 2009 06:41:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Amazon is on the cusp of busting out a new, large format Kindle. The new e-ink device could be here this week and be big enough to read magazine and newspaper layouts without too much dickering with their designs.

This is the claim made in yesterday’s New York Times, citing “people briefed on the online retailer’s plans.”

Unfortunately, the story then goes off into a kind of newspaper fantasy land, full of unicorns, marshmallows and time-reversals. The big hope for the Big Kindle is that it will somehow reverse the fortunes of the the spluttering print news industry, allowing publishers to charge subscription fees and load their pages with advertising, even though everyone with an internet connection can get the same content free.

The move by newspapers and magazines to make their material freely available on the Web is now viewed by many as a critical blunder that encouraged readers to stop paying for the print versions.

And:

Publishers could possibly use these new mobile reading devices to hit the reset button and return in some form to their original business model: selling subscriptions, and supporting their articles with ads.

This is, apparently, serious. The trouble with this business “model” is that it forgets that there is an internet, while at the same time using that same internet as a convenient distribution system an order of magnitude cheaper than pulping trees, running them through a building-sized press and then moving them around the country in trucks. As others have written, news won’t go away if newspapers go away. The format of a print newspaper is dictated not by the content (the news) but by the technological limits of its production and distribution.

The NYT piece mentions, in passing, the real market for a large-format e-book: Text books. Not only would a big Kindle be easier to carry than a back-breaking rucksack full of college books, it would probably be cheaper. Cheaper, that is, if only the publishers would relent and stop overcharging for downloaded material.

For they, too, profit from scarcity, just like the newspapers, and scarcity no longer exists in a digital world. Charging $100 for a ones-and-zeros version of a $100 book is obviously nonsense, as the record labels found out when they lost their own industry to piracy. And the market here is college students, apparently the most voracious pirates of all. Catch them quick, textbook makers. Subsidize this new Kindle, make the books way cheaper than they are in print and allow students to re-sell them when they’re done, like they can now. Otherwise those students won’t be paying for your books at all.

Finally, while a large-screen Kindle would be very welcome, Amazon should perhaps start selling the regular Kindle outside the US. Just saying, is all.

Update: It looks like the story is true. Amazon has started sending out invites for a press event this Wednesday. Wired.com will be covering it, so stay tuned to Gadget Lab for the lowdown.

Update 3:30pm Pacific: According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, six universities will be offering their students e-textbooks on the large-screen Kindle.

Looking to Big-Screen E-Readers to Help Save the Daily Press [NYT]

Go ahead and grab the salt shaker, ’cause this one’s nowhere near carved in stone… or is it? A breaking report from The New York Times has it that Amazon will introduce a larger version of its Kindle e-reader “as early as this week,” one that’s tailored for “displaying newspapers, magazines and perhaps textbooks.” If you’ll recall, magazine publisher Hearst made its intentions public to produce such a device earlier this year, noting that a larger panel would be more conducive to traditional print media layouts, and thus, additional revenue from ads. The article also notes that Plastic Logic will “start making digital newspaper readers by the end of the year.”

Coincidentally (or not), the Wall Street Journal also published a report this evening that dug deeper into the aforementioned Hearst deal. As the story goes, a number of big-shots in the publishing industry are banding together to set their own subscription rates (rather than go through a middleman such as Amazon), and this writeup asserts that Plastic Logic’s reader won’t actually roll out until “early next year” (as we’d heard previously). If you’re seriously able to handle yet another twist in this madness, WSJ also points out that “people familiar with the matter” have stated that Apple is “readying a device that may make it easier to read digital books and periodicals,” but it’s hard to say if this is simply regurgitation of unfounded rumors already going around or something entirely more legitimate.

All in all, it’s clear that flagging print publications are desperate for a device that caters to its layout and allows them to regulate rates — only time will tell if there’s room for two, three or possibly more of these so-called “big-screen e-readers” in the world, but this week definitely just got a whole lot more interesting.

Update: Press event invite just received, it’s on for Wednesday!

Read – New York Times report
Read – Wall Street Journal report

Filed under: Displays, Handhelds

NYT: Big-screen Kindle coming from Amazon “as early as this week” originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 03 May 2009 23:05:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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