Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos unveiled the much-anticipated large-screen Kindle e-reader Wednesday at the downtown Pace University. Called the Kindle DX, the new device is geared toward readers of personal and professional documents, newspapers, and magazines–and textbooks, a potentially huge target market.
The debut of the bigger Kindle wasn’t exactly a secret: rumors of a larger-screen Kindle had been around for quite some time, and concrete reports began to surface earlier this week.
According to Amazon’s Kindle DX page, the device has the following:
• A 9.7-inch display with 16 shades of gray. (The standard Kindle has a 6-inch display.)
• Capacity to hold up to 3,500 books, periodicals, and documents.
• An auto-rotating screen to show either portrait or landscape views.
• A built-in PDF reader.
• 3G wireless network support with no monthly fees or annual contracts.
• Battery capacity to “read for days without charging.”
• Text-to-speech abilities to read publications aloud.
Several of those features are shared with the current Kindle 2, but several are unique to the Kindle DX: the native PDF reader that doesn’t require the files to be converted, the rotating display, the 3,500-publication capacity compared to 1,500 for the Kindle 2, and of course the larger screen.
“You never have to pan, you never have to zoom, you never have to scroll, you just see the documents,” Bezos said.
The Kindle DX retails for $489 (the standard Kindle is $359), and is available for pre-orders now on Amazon. It’ll ship this summer.
mazon has partnered with textbook manufacturers Pearson, Cengage Learning, and Wiley to bring textbooks to the Kindle.
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