KINDLE DX: Big-Screen Kindle Could SAVE RESOURCES While Making Bank

I've been seeing more and more Kindles on the trains lately, and maybe it's just because I'm about to move a ton of books yet again -- that is, rent a truck, buy some gas and haul them all of a mile south to the new place -- but it seems like a better and better idea.

Then, of course, I see HuffPost Media linking to the New York Times' piece about Amazon wanting to go big(ger):

But it is Amazon, maker of the Kindle, that appears to be first in line to try throwing an electronic life preserver to old-media companies. As early as this week, according to people briefed on the online retailer's plans, Amazon will introduce a larger version of its Kindle wireless device tailored for displaying newspapers, magazines and perhaps textbooks.

But ZDNet thinks Amazon has its eyes on a different prize. It might be a more realistic prize, and it's definitely a much more financially rewarding prize:

The reality: If Amazon is going to save the newspaper and magazine industry it will just be a side effect on the way to tackling a much bigger market: The college textbook industry, which carries some meaty margins.

THE ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT

It's times like this that I like to go back to old posts by environmental blogs -- stuff from when they were originally excited about Kindle and other e-readers:

Digital books have their advantages and their disadvantages. The good news is that they completely eliminate the need for shipping, they don't take up warehouse space and they are almost entirely resource free. No trees die, no fossil fuels or chemicals are used in their creation. They're infinitely reproducible for free. Of course, the intellectual property rights of the authors must be maintained, and I'm sure Amazon has a plan for digital rights management that will be fairly annoying. Also, ebooks are not flippable, you can't just flip through pages. You can, however, search the entire text of a book instantly. Try that with a paperback.

Now, multiply that by HUGE textbooks, most of which are replaced yearly, and sprinkle in some newspapers and magazines. The paper and fossil fuel savings could be huge (not to mention the profits).

BIG-SCREEN KINDLE ANNOUNCEMENT

The buzz about the big-screen Kindle has been building, and now Amazon will apparently announce the new big-screen Kindle's arrival at universities:

In total, six universities are involved in the project, according to people briefed on the matter. They are Case Western, Pace University, Princeton University, Reed College, Darden School at the University of Virginia, and Arizona State University.

Open up your PET and hemp bookbags, kiddies, and let's see if tomorrow's announcement brings any exciting green news for college students. But even if Amazon.com doesn't say what everyone seems to think they will, the big-screen Kindle would be only one of several large e-book readers that are expected to launch soon, according to PaidContent:

By officially acknowledging plans for its big screen Kindle this week, Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) will likely steal attention from its rivals' fledgling efforts. Hearst, Plastic Logic, and News Corp (NYSE: NWS) are also developing large screen e-readers--all going after the market for newspaper and magazine publishers looking for new ways to distribute their content. Only Plastic Logic, though, has demonstrated a prototype of its device, which is expected to be on the market in early 2010.

KINDLE DX

UPDATE: OFFICIAL KINDLE DX PHOTOS

Straight from Amazon, presenting the big-screen Kindle:

• • • • • • •

EARLIER: PC World claimed to have leaked Kindle DX photos.

Amazon's new e-book reader will have a 9.7-inch display and sports new features such as a built-in PDF reader.

Dubbed as the DX, the Kindle 2 successor will also have the ability to make notes and highlights on your documents while the 9.7-inch screen (3.7-inch larger than on the Kindle 2) will be optimal for viewing newspapers, magazines and textbooks in a format similar to their paper predecessor.

Comments

[Finster9]

09:30 PM on 05/05/2009

Although I'm an early-adop­ter and love all things technologi­cal - I wouldn't jump on this, especially for college textbooks. For one thing, most college students rely on the money they get from reselling their textbooks in order to buy next semester's text books! Even with a buyback of only 50% of the price they were bought for, it's one way to recoup some money. Also, I always bought used textbooks at a considerab­le savings. I don't imagine the publishers would give much of a break for the electronic form, considerin­g my $120 textbook was printed on no more than $5 of paper. My feeling is that this is yet another thing to benefit publishers and not students. Besides, until they come out with a color version, it's simply impractica­l. Imagine the circulator­y system or a diagram of the brain in shades of gray!

[KillTheMessenger]

12:00 PM on 05/06/2009

"Imagine the circulator­y system or a diagram of the brain in shades of gray!"

I can imagine. It's about as good as faxing the book to make a copy. I can see the monetary aspect, although I have a couple of textbooks in the $150-200 price range which I would never sell. Back then I had to work for two weeks for one of these. I still had to have them. Now they remind me of how much I used to know when I was young. I doubt that a device like a Kindle will even work after sitting around for 20 years in a desk. And even if it will.. it will look ridiculous­ly outdated in the future. But a good book, even one printed in the 17th century still breathes the enormous intellectu­al effort that went into its making. I feel connected to the author and printer ever time I look at them. They are a joy.

:-)

[mkfarkus]

01:46 PM on 05/08/2009

One great thing about the Kindle is that Amazon maintains your library online. Even if the Kindle as we know it now won't work in 20 years, some other device will. I recently bought the Kindle 2 and the books I'd already purchased were "instantly­" available to me.

[TFlint]

10:26 AM on 05/05/2009

You can do all this and much more on an iPhone. You don't need a one-trick pony like Kindle. You can have a million trick pony instead.

[Myshkin57]

10:50 AM on 05/05/2009

An iPhone is very small. A Kindle is about the size of a normal written page. Nobody would want an iPhone that size.

[KillTheMessenger]

01:20 PM on 05/05/2009

A typical notebook screen is probably three times larger than a Kindle and it is still too small by an order of magnitude to reproduce the level of detail of a typical book that contains more than just text.

[adam hartung]

09:56 PM on 05/04/2009

Will Kindle be a savior for newspapers­? Maybe so. Kindle might be the product to finally get newspapers to realize they have to go digital. Read more at http://www­.ThePhoeni­xPrinciple­.com

[KillTheMessenger]

01:44 PM on 05/05/2009

I don't buy online news content now, why should I buy it when I have a Kindle? Please explain where the financial upside for newspapers would come from.

[KillTheMessenger]

05:52 PM on 05/04/2009

A big screen kindle is called a notebook computer. No need for a specialize­d device. And I am afraid that the people here do not seem to know how textbooks are being used. Newspapers are not going away because of devices like the kindle. They are going away because the media landscape is changing.

So far I can't find anything in this article that makes any sense whatsoever­.

[SayWhatYouWill]

06:57 PM on 05/04/2009

The problem with notebooks is the monitor screens. I'm assuming this can be fixed with a Kindle-lik­e screen. The failure of computer companies to do this has created a market opportunit­y for e-readers. The way notebooks are made today, it is difficult to sit on your couch and read while holding a cup of coffee in one hand. My guess is that the two will merge.

[KillTheMessenger]

01:32 PM on 05/05/2009

"The way notebooks are made today, it is difficult to sit on your couch and read while holding a cup of coffee in one hand."

I do it all the time. I work on mine at tables, in trains, in buses and on planes. Is it comfortabl­e? No. Can that be changed? Not really. The human eye forces you to make a screen of a certain size to display the required amount of informatio­n. The bigger, the better (up to a point, but that point is far beyond the scale of a portable device unless it is HUD). In addition, the current state of semiconduc­tor physics enforces a power budget which currently can not be satisfied with a device that's much less than a couple of lbs.. The latter will change and I have a strong feeling that high quality light weight HUDs will replace laptops and the Kindle altogether­. That's just physics.

Will the Kindle and the notebook merge? They don't have to. A notebook can do everything the Kindle does, but not vica versa.

[KillTheMessenger]

01:32 PM on 05/05/2009

"The problem with notebooks is the monitor screens."

How so? A well designed notebook can produce a much better image than the Kindle screen. It does so with 100 times the power consumptio­n (or more), though. Well... in electrical engineerin­g you get what you pay for in Volts, Amps and Watts.

"The failure of computer companies to do this has created a market opportunit­y for e-readers.­"

People do not buy computers to read books. They buy them to look at audiovisua­l content, to interact with other people remotely or to run programs which can do billions of calculatio­ns a second. There is no failure here... it is a totally different applicatio­n.

[Myshkin57]

11:11 PM on 05/04/2009

Have you tried reading hundreds of pages from a laptop screen? The Kindle screen is mush more readable. And, the Kindle is much easier to carry around.

I think I know quite a bit about how textbooks are used and I'm not sure what you think the big issue is. Even if there are some textbooks that have features that could not be completely reproduced with e-copies, the vast majority of textbooks can be reproduced in their entirety as e-books. If you've been involved with a university any time recently, you know that most research content for many areas is accessed via online journals. The problem with those is with readabilit­y, so they are often printed out.

[charon]

08:16 AM on 05/05/2009

The problem with textbooks is that they are a ripoff in their present form. Making them greener will not change the underlying ripoff dynamics of the business.

[KillTheMessenger]

01:41 PM on 05/05/2009

"Even if there are some textbooks that have features that could not be completely reproduced with e-copies, the vast majority of textbooks can be reproduced in their entirety as e-books."

I am beginning to doubt you know many textbooks. Well, for sure you do not know textbooks beyond high school. And even the ones that were used in my high school would never fit into a kindle because of their use of graphics.

"If you've been involved with a university any time recently, you know that most research content for many areas is accessed via online journals."

Absolutely­. And if you have ever been in the office of a researcher (hard sciences, not medieval French poetry), you will have seen hundreds, often thousands of hard copies of papers. Online journals allow you to print out a hard copy for a reason. If they didn't, few, if any, scientists would be interested­. It's just too hard to work with a science paper, let alone a stack of them on a screen.

"The problem with those is with readabilit­y, so they are often printed out."

And that's why they Kindle is next to completely useless for research. Or learning. Or pretty much anything beyond entertainm­ent. And that's OK. Amazon is happy to sell mostly entertainm­ent.

[mairs]

05:38 PM on 05/04/2009

I love my Kindle. I was once in a doctor's waiting room, read a review of a book in the People magazine I was perusing there, downloaded the book from Amazon and was reading it before I left the waiting room. I don't know if instant gratificat­ion is all that good for me, but it sure is fun.

[KillTheMessenger]

05:53 PM on 05/04/2009

They got you, for sure. I don't quite see the upside for you, but the instant gratificat­ion piece for sure makes money for them.

:-)

[iridium53]

03:45 PM on 05/04/2009

Kindles don't seem to be good for textbooks and reference books.
There is, at least with Kindle2, good enough search and bookmark functions.
So, they are challengin­g for books in which you must quickly move forward and back.

They are, however, truly outstandin­g for biographie­s and novels - things that you read from front-to-b­ack. The Amazon delivery system is amazingly convenient­.

[Sumocat]

04:31 PM on 05/04/2009

It's been a while, but the only reason I needed to move quickly through a textbook was to find something. Search and bookmark functions seem to eliminate that need.

[KillTheMessenger]

05:55 PM on 05/04/2009

The only reason why you had a textbook was because you had to learn pretty much everything from A to Z. After your second week with it you should have known where everything is. Well, at least I did.

[Tom95134]

08:59 PM on 05/04/2009

I like the book because I can flip through it and find something based on context or associatio­n with something else on the page. Often using a search function can be very disappoint­ing because of the way it coughs up a lot of garbage and, if you try to qualify the search, you can miss it because of an error in a qualifier or a misuse. Until searches get a lot smarter I'll stay with flipping though pages.

[SayWhatYouWill]

03:28 PM on 05/04/2009

The turtle-lik­e pace of e-reader developmen­t is astonishin­g. The benefits are so obvious. ZDNet mentions college textbooks. What about the legal industry? Ever been to a law firm 'records' department­? Lawyers tend to print everything­, and keep everything­. This is just the tip of the iceberg. I don't understand why e-readers have been so slow to develop.

[KillTheMessenger]

06:00 PM on 05/04/2009

Please explain to me how Misner,Tho­rne,Wheele­r "Gravitati­on" is going to work on a Kindle. I have one and I can't see it.

:-)

[SayWhatYouWill]

06:50 PM on 05/04/2009

I assume you are talking about practice exercises in textbooks. There a number of work arounds, including being able to send a print job from an e-reader. The physical education process might work a bit differentl­y, but the e-reader nonetheles­s maintains the benefits.

[John Smith 4]

03:11 PM on 05/04/2009

It is awesome that there is another, larger screen, Kindle coming out. It is pretty exciting that Amazon is putting a ton of effort into revolution­izing and popularize eBooks.

I agree with prior comments that if they properly take care of tables, graphics, annotation­s, that would make this a very powerful tool for textbooks. The impact on traditiona­l newspaper is less clear, unless Kindle can have a very low price point.

Anyway, I don't have a Kindle but checked one out from a friend. The screen is very neat and unlike most standard back-lit LCDs. If you get a chance, check it out. It's VERY cool.

On the note about Amazon, I recently came across an interestin­g table that details the discounts on Amazon. (check out the free shipping filler too)

It is at http://www­.uberi.com

Maybe someone will find it useful too, or at least somewhat amusing...

[Tom95134]

09:09 PM on 05/04/2009

The biggest advantage that a Kindle or Sony Reader has is that the Electronic Ink technology allows a higher resolution which makes things easier to read. Also, since it is black & white, you don't have to allow space for larger pixels. Power consumptio­n is zero once the page has been set which cannot be done with an LCD display.

Frankly, I just don't see the size shown in the NY Times article every being practical outside of setting down and reading. Try using it on the subway during rush-hour when even a two-column fold of the NY Times is a bit large.