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First Look: Amazon’s Kindle DX goes to larger screens Bernard Cole San Francisco, Ca. - Amazon.com Inc has introduced Kindle DX, a larger, souped-up version of its electronic reader, designed for students and newspaper readers. With a $489 price tag could make it has a 9.7 inch black-and-white display, is designed to be a more friendly vehicle for textbooks and newspapers, which often need a larger space to display their content effectively. The DX has about 2.5 times the surface area of the normal Kindle and costs $130 more. While it has a less-cluttered layout than the average computer screen and is easier on the eyes than a monitor, the DX provides less interactivity than on other hand-held devices. It does not offer color or touch-screen. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Boston Globe will start pilot programs with the DX this summer. He said five universities will do pilot programs with the reader acting as an all-in-one textbook. The DX also allows people to read personal documents, and is touted as a way for businesspeople and others to avoid having to carry around an assortment of loose papers. Besides making highly formatted pages easier to read, the DX has more memory, 3.3 gigabytes, which can hold up to 3,500 books versus the normal Kindle's 1,500. Amazon is hoping that newspaper publishers find the Kindle DX a better way to show off their daily editions with companies as the New York Times and The Washington Post offering the DX at a reduced price to readers where home delivery of those newspapers is not available. Newspapers are already available on the regular Kindle where a subscription to The New York Times costs $13.99 per month, and the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times cost $9.99. Textbook publishers Cengage Learning Inc, Pearson Plc and Wiley will offer books through the Kindle store starting this summer, with others to follow. Trials using the DX beginning this fall will be conducted at Arizona State University, Case Western Reserve University, Princeton University, Reed College and the University of Virginia's Darden School of Business, the company said. Amazon did not disclose the price of e-textbooks, but they are likely to be at a discount to physical books. The hand-held Kindle, updated earlier this year and only available in the United States, allows users to read books, newspapers, magazines and blogs. Like the regular Kindle, DX users will be able to get access to books that can be downloaded through the Kindle store for $9.99 in most cases. To learn more, go to www.amazon.com.
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