The Big Kindle DX Revealed

Amazon is revealing its third Kindle today at a jam-packed press conference in New York City. The new Kindle, which we first caught wind of last year, is expected to have a larger screen to be used for reading newspapers, magazines, and textbooks. (Don’t expect it to save the newspaper industry, though). Arthur Sullzberger, Jr. of the New York Times is in the house I’ll be liveblogging the event, which should start any minute now.

The Kindle vision is every book ever printed available in 60 seconds. 18 months ago launched with 90K books, 200K books with launch of Kindle 2, added another 45K books.

Where we have Kindle editions, Kindle is now 35% of books sold for those titles. It took us 14 years to build up our physical books business. We find this very encouraging.

Bezos introduces the Kindle DX, built in PDF reader. No zooming, no panning, just read. shows off cookbooks, a picture of Sushi doesn’t look too appetizing in gray-scale, however, atlases, and textbooks.

announcing partnership with three top textbook publishers which account for 60% of textbook sales (Pearson, Wiley and Cengage Learning).

5 universities have agreed to pilot Arizona State, Princeton, Reed, U of Virginia, Case Western Reserve

Newspapers have been popular. This summer 3 newspapers have agreed to pilot Kindle DX for a reduced price in return for long term commitments for subscriptions, NYT, Washington Post and Boston Globe. But only for people who live in places where local delivery is not available.

Bezos is showing off PDF documents. pilots charts, sheet music, a document from Bezos’ library on rocket thruster. “This is the type of document I would have wasted ink toner on.”

With a large screen Bezos is showing that with teh larger screen newspaper headlines can now be accompanied with the first few lines of text when scanning headlines. For textbooks, you can change the number of lines and font size that it displays.

Amazon's new Kindle DX boasts a newspaper-friendly screen that's 2.5x bigger than the standard Kindle, but it's also got a few tricks of its own (new features in bold):

. 9.7-inch E-Ink screen (1200 x 824 with 16 shades of grey)
. 1/3 of an inch thick (10.4" x 7.2" x 0.38")
. 4GB Storage for 3,500 books (a bump from 1,500)
. Unspecified but "long" battery life
. Native PDF support through built-in reader
. Automatic landscape/portrait text rotation
. Line length adjustments (determine the width of text on the screen)
. Navigation buttons moved to right side of screen only
. EVDO (of course) for 60-second book transfers
. 3G wireless access to 275K books
. $9.99 or less for NYT best sellers, discount subscription coming for newspapers
. $489 for Kindle DX versus $359 for 6 inch display