All this week the internet was buzzing with the incoming announcement of a new Kindle. It didn’t take long for photos and details to leak out, and let us know that this Kindle would be larger in size and address some concerns with the Kindle 2. A lot of people called this an elegant power play by Amazon, letting them hit the large screen e-reader competition like Hearst and Plastic Logic before they even hit the market.
May 6th was the day of Amazon’s official press release, which gave us a lot of new information for the Kindle DX while rehashing the stuff we’ve already known about the Kindle line of products.
A strange thing happened on the way to the paperless society. We humans created more paper than ever before. Computer printers (and their evil companion, the ink-toner cartridge) have proliferated, and most of us routinely print out and lug around loads of personal and professional documents. Why? It’s not that buying printers or changing ink-toner cartridges is fun. It’s because reading on paper is better than reading on traditional computer displays. Printing has been worth the hassle.
Kindle starts to change that… If I can carry my whole library around on my Kindle, how about I carry all my personal and professional documents there too? - Jeff Bezos
Same as it Ever Was
The Kindle DX carries all the same tools that people have come to love from the Kindle 2. Clear, easy to read E Ink screen, EVDO wireless for grabbing books on the go, and a long battery life. In fact, the device looks almost exactly like a Kindle 2, just a lot bigger. For a lot of Kindle 2 users this is exactly what they’ve been looking for, and some might feel slighted that they bought a Kindle 2 rather than waiting for something bigger and better to come along.
Of course, with the bigger screen comes a bigger price tag. The Kindle DX is over 100$ more than the Kindle 2, clocking in at mean $489 dollars. During the presentation for the Kindle DX Jeff Bezois (CEO of Amazon) said that there will be a discount on newspaper subscriptions, to offset the high price. Some newspapers have even teamed up with Amazon to allow Kindles at a reduced price for long term newspaper subscriptions. Could this be the savior for the dying Newspaper print industry? The New York Times sure hopes so.
The Brand New Features
But not everything was a rehash of Kindle 2’s capabilities. The large screen (9.7 inches) has brought in a whole slew of added functionality. The DX has rotation, mirroring and flipping capabilities, allowing you to turn the page you’re reading however you like. It also has the ability to display magazine and newspapers full screen, without the need to zoom or scroll through each page.
Also with the DX come the much needed built in PDF support. No longer do you have to pay the Amazon Kindle tax (10 cents to convert PDF files) for every single PDF you wish to read on your Kindle DX. You just upload it to your Kindle DX and then you can view it just like any other Kindle book. This support was probably added to the request of the Universities who are testing out the Kindle DX as a replacement for textbooks, since most electronic textbooks are in PDF format.
The memory size was bumped up as well, now a beefy 4GB allowing you to store up to around 3,500 books. Since the DX is targeted at textbooks, newspapers and magazines the added space makes perfect sense. Getting a new newspaper every week or a new magazine every month will eat into that space fairly quickly.
Release Date and Competition
The Kindle DX is slotted to be released this summer, beating the large screen e-readers to market by a few months. This can be bad news for a lot of the competition, who hoped to rely on larger screen and newspaper subscriptions as a counter point to the small Kindle 2 and Sony PRS series of e-readers. The only way they could beat the Kindle DX now is through a price war, which might not be possible since 40% of any e-reader’s price is in the cost of the e-paper itself.
We can only hope Plastic Logic will bring healthy competition to the table and stop Amazon from creating a monopoly in the e-book market. The last thing we want is the e-reader industry locked up in Amazon’s proprietary format. If Amazon holds the keys to the e-book kingdom, then readers and publishers alike will have no other choice but to meet there demands, and that could worsen an already dying industry. For example, the Kindle is demanding 70% of the profits from magazine and newspaper subscriptions, and granting themselves republishing right on other devices like the iPhone. This can only be disastrous for newspapers, eating into their already marginal profit lines.
You can pre-order the Amazon DX right now on Amazon’s website, to make sure you’re first in line to get yours when it comes out this summer. The hefty price tag will make sure it doesn’t cut too much into the Kindle 2’s profits, though the benefits definitely seem to make it worth the extra money. All it needs now is a touch screen interface.
amazon, e-reader, kindle dx