May 7, 2009

Kindle to the rescue: Will it save the newspaper industry while making text books less of a ripoff?

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Jeff Bezos continues to perfect his Steve Jobs impersonation with his presentation of Kindle's third incarnation

Jeff Bezos continues to perfect his Steve Jobs impersonation with his presentation of Kindle's third incarnation

So the Amazon press conference went, well, exactly as its leaked agenda said it would — the newspaper it was leaked to, the New York Times, reports Jeff Bezos did indeed announce a new, larger-screen Kindle reader, the Kindle DX (for Deluxe), “pitching it as a new way for people to read textbooks, newspapers and their personal documents.”

Brad Stone and Motoko Rich report the device, which goes on sale this summer, “has a screen that is two and a half times the size of the screens on the two older versions of the Kindle.” It also has a price that is considerably larger: $489, or $130 more than the Kindle 2.

Presenting it to the world at Pace University in Manhattan, Bezos said Amazon “had reached agreements with three major textbook publishers, Pearson, Cengage Learning and Wiley Higher Education, to make their books available in the Kindle store,” while six more universities would begin testing the device — which costs $489 — to consider doing the same.

But Stone and Rich bury the lede in the sixth graf, which is where they report not that the device costs $489, but that, starting this summer, three newspapers — The New York Times, The Boston Globe and The Washington Post — would offer the device not at its list price ($489), but at “a reduced price to subscribers who sign up for long-term subscriptions. But few details were available, and both Amazon and the newspapers described it as a pilot program.”

An unlinkable Publisher’s Lunch report from Micahel Cader notes “In a brief speech, NYT chief Arthur Sulzberger clarified that his company’s marketing trials are focused on ‘areas where home delivery is not available,'” but would be now, for $489.

Or, as it was summarized in the headline of this nicely-detailed and somewhat envious report from CNet UK in England, where Kindle in any iteration is still unavailable, the DX is “Over-sized, over-priced, and over there.”

Dennis Johnson is the founder of MobyLives, and the co-founder and co-publisher of Melville House.

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