What Touchco means for Amazon

Amazon recently acquired the New York based start-up Touchco, which was working on a revolutionary new touch screen technology at the time. Coming right on the heels of the iPad announcement, it’s easy to assume what this means for the Kindle: potentially color and a touch screen.  If Touchco’s technology is what it was promised to be, this could also come at a relatively low-cost (apparently the touch screen technology only costs about $10 a square foot and is remarkably power efficient as well). In addition the technology can distinguish between finger touches and pen marks, which may lead to a device that incorporates handwriting recognition as well as gestures.

There’s one catch. As of last year Touchco was a small company with a technology that seemed promising but not quite commercial yet. So, how soon can the benefits of the acquisition be realized? The iPad as we know will be in the hands of consumers in about 60 days.  It’s important that Amazon not give up the momentum that it has built-in the e-reader space and allow the iPad’s ebook marketplace to take market share.

This depends on how Amazon plans to use the acquisition and Touchco’s technology. If Amazon was already working on the next generation Kindle at its Cupertino based Lab126, and is really looking for some final touches and people from Touchco, we could see a new product relatively soon. Lab126 which introduced us to the Kindle and has played a significant role in revolutionizing the e-reader market, has been recruiting aggressively over the last few months. This suggests that something big is definitely in process.

If I were to make a guess though, I would guess that Amazon was not working on the touch aspect and this is an attempt to get up the curve quickly there. Unfortunately, that would put the development of a touch screen based Kindle at least an year away (likely longer).

I think from Amazon’s perspective, it’s important to get this right. We’ve seen what poorly implemented touch screens can do to the reading experience with the Sony reader. I for one am interested to see what the new device looks like. Lab126 has several former Palm and Apple executives in its ranks, so they should be able to come up with something that competes with Apple’s world class industrial engineering and user experience focus.

Amazon is probably also working hard to improve its Kindle for iPhone app to work on the iPad. Although the app should work as is, almost with no changes at all, it’s important that the company focus on the demands of a big screen. Users are unlikely to be happy with the current blog, magazine and newspaper reading layouts when they have flashy competing apps on the iPad. Amazon must come up with something like what the New York Times did with the great Times Reader app which is an amazingly cool way to show newspaper content on a computer screen.

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Amazon Kindle Update – Student Perspective

Readers of my blog who read my Kindle DX review probably know how excited I was about the kindle and about using it as my reader for school cases, textbooks etc.  I have to admit that my initial assessment of how appropriate the Kindle DX would be for business school may not have been accurate.  Because of this, I wanted to write a brief update to describe what my experiences have been so far.

Of the 6+ textbooks that were assigned for reading at the GSB none were available in Kindle format.  However, based on what I’ve noticed over the last few weeks, I’m glad that this was the case.  The only book that I was able to get on the kindle was one that we were analyzing for “Critical Analytical Thinking” (CAT). The book was called Blink (note: I do not recommend this book to anyone reading my blog!).

For CAT, we had to write a paper dissecting the arguments in a limited number of chapters from Blink.

Issues that I had:

– Many discussions and citations require page numbers. The Kindle does not have any. I had to add an extra note to the instructor to explain why I couldn’t cite my sources.

– Once you’ve read the book and want to find something that you read, to quickly refer to again as you are writing, it’s very hard to do this on the Kindle. There is no equivalent to the quick page flip that we do so often and we take for granted. Yes, I know there’s a word search function, but it does not really work for me.

– There’s no real way to quickly refer back to a prior chapter and come back to where you were like you can do in a book.

For these reasons, I’m not convinced about how successful the Kindle will be in an academic context. What worries me the most is that the book I was reading here wasn’t even a textbook, this was the kind of book you read from beginning to end but I still found myself wishing I had the paper version instead.

Lastly, for case discussions, what I’ve found is that most proper case readings require you to make notes, underline etc as you read. Because of this it’s very difficult to use the Kindle as a case reader despite the Kindle DX’s pdf capabilities.

I do still love me Kindle but I think I’ll be focusing on using it for non-academic reading.

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Amazon Drops Kindle 2 Price to $299

In a surprising move, Amazon has dropped the price of the bestselling version of it’s Kindle reader (the Kindle 2) to 299. The K2 is already available at the new lower price through Amazon.com. My guess is that this is an attempt to preempt aggressive moves by cheap readers like Cool-er, BeBook, and the Sony Reader. At $299, I think the Kindle with built-in wireless delivery capabilities presents a compelling proposition.

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Kindle DX – Manga and Magazines

I wrote about my impressions of the Kindle DX here. However, I didn’t get to test two things properly: Manga and Magazines.

Manga

Manga works really well on the Kindle DX (although there is the occasional crash). I used one of my old Rurouni Kenshin images for this test. I zipped the folder containing the pages (which are individually in .jpg format), created a folder called “Pictures” in the Kindle DX directory and copied the zip file over there.

The DX immediately showed the name of the image folder at the top of my document list. You can actually make a folder in “Documents” and copy the images there too, it still works (i.e. without a picture folder).

Don’t forget to hit “Alt-z” to force the DX to rescan the folders for images.

First the bad: it’s a little slow, some pages can take some time to refresh and in full screen mode about half an inch of the page at the bottom is hidden. The go to beginning feature although shown, does not work. So if you go through say a hundred pages and want to get to the beginning, there really isn’t a way to do that unless you are willing to page through all hundred pages painfully. When I tried to do this and pressed page up rapidly, the Kindle DX went back to my home page and showed me the dictionary as the only document I have! Thankfully after a couple of restarts and then connecting to the computer again all of my documents and books reappeared on the Kindle. Note that this did not happen under normal usage and so I think crashes of this type are rare (as long as you are patient).

The good: the DX screen size is almost perfect for reading Manga. Images render well and are very readable (no scrolling around). As I mentioned above the bottom .5 inch is eaten up in full screen mode (you can scroll down to see this), but in my test the only thing I was missing was the border of the page and the page number, so it was fine.

Sorry about the poor quality of these images (they were taken with the iPhone camera):

Magazines

Unfortunately magazines have not changed much from the Kindle 2 versions. Yes, the screen is larger but it just means you have more text on the screen. I haven’t seen any real “Optimized for DX” magazines yet. Amazon’s magazine interface (just like the newspaper one that I commented on in my prior review) is not great. Most articles have been reduced to just text. In my mind a pageful of text is not a great reading experience. I do have to add that I only tested one magazine (Forbes). I’ve seen other reviewers who’ve looked at the New Yorker and said the same.

So there is a lot of promise in the DX hardware but the software is not really taking advantage of it right now. The screen of the DX would be ideal for displaying magazines just the way that the paper versions look, although I don’t know what impact this would have on bandwidth use and Sprint’s network.

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Amazon Kindle DX Review: A Student Perspective

UPDATE: IF YOU READ THIS POST, PLEASE ALSO READ MY UPDATED THOUGHTS HERE.

Amazon shipped the DX two days ago and I received mine yesterday. These are my impressions based on just about a day of usage.

First, this is my first electronic reader, it’s also my first experience with e-ink. My first thought as I looked at the screen was wow, the screen is very crisp and clear (much clearer than my photographs below show). Images render beautifully, and look great on the screen, although everything is in shades of gray. Amazon ships the Kindle with the getting started instructions “frozen” on the Kindle DX screen since e-ink requires no power to maintain what’s on the screen.

Hardware

The screen size (9.7 inches) feels perfect for just about any content. The fonts can be made large enough to be very comfortable for anyone, even if your sight isn’t perfect. The screen resolution looks good, and text is very readable even for downloaded PDFs (more on that later).

The DX is not particularly light. It probably weighs a little more than the weight of two regular one subject notebooks. For one handed use, it works but it’s not easy to hold with one hand for long unless you lean it on your arm. I can see why some users who don’t need business documents, textbooks or newspaper content would prefer the smaller (6 inch) Kindle. The buttons which are now on just the one side of the Kindle DX shouldn’t really bother anyone in my opinion as it can easily be rotated around (screen rotates automatically like on the iPhone). I found myself often using my left hand (even though I’m right handed) when I was using the DX with one hand (with it leaning on my arm).

The device is very thin and the official Amazon cover doesn’t add a lot of additional heft to it leaving a device that looks about the size of a notebook (slightly thicker with case, slightly smaller footprint).

The Kindle DX slides easily into the hinges of the cover (a additional $49 purchase from Amazon). The hinges hold the device solidly while the cover snaps shut firmly using magnets. On previous versions of the kindle, there were complaints of the kindle cover opening accidentally while in a carry bag. The DX cover’s magnet should stop this from happening. The cover itself is made of leather but doesn’t look that great from the outside. It is however very functional and the interior is comfortably lined in suede which is perfect for one handed reading. I would avoid covers in the market that don’t use the hinge system and instead use loops at the four corners.

The keyboard at the bottom of the DX that Amazon hopes students will use to make notes, is probably the worst part of the Kindle design. The keys are tiny and not very easy to press. It feels like a blackberry keyboard but with awkward spaces inserted in the middle.

Hopefully Amazon will come out with some sort of keyboard accessory support for this that will allow a better portable keyboard to be fixed to the USB port (might be wishful thinking).

The other new hardware feature is the auto rotation of the screen. The DX ships with this set to automatic by default. One of the first things I did was to change this to manual. The DX screen switching on auto, can be very trigger-happy. Based on the preferred reading angle, it’s easy to change orientation unintentionally. However, this is corrected with one press of the “Aa” button and a couple of moves of the five way “joystick” control.

Usage

One of the main features that I wanted to try out on the DX was the ability to view business school cases in PDF form. I connected to Stanford’s webapps and downloaded a few cases. Amazon gives two ways of transferring personal documents to the Kindle.

a) Email it to Amazon and it will be delivered wirelessly to the Kindle (costs 15 cents a megabyte – could be about a $1 per document or significantly more based on the size of the file).

b) Connect via the provided USB cable and just copy the file over (similar to copying files onto a standard USB drive).

I used the second option which is what I think I will be doing once classes start in the fall. It was very straightforward. When connected via USB, the Kindle cannot be used to read unless you “eject” the USB drive. If the USB drive is ejected it will continue to charge while you read.

When connected via USB, folders can be created on the Kindle to organize the content. However, these folders do not appear on the device itself. For example I created a folder called “Stanford Cases” but as shown in the images, this didn’t affect the organization of the documents on the screen. Hopefully a firmware update will add support for folder display that will make it easier to navigate through documents. In its current form if someone did have the 3,000+ books that Amazon says you can carry on the DX, finding a book from that library could be difficult.

PDF versions of cases display perfectly on the device, with even the smaller fonts being very readable. Without measuring scientifically it looks like in portrait mode the PDF’s are shown at about 80-85% of full size. The DX does not support zooming of PDFs, however there is a feature which essentially is a fixed zoom. When the orientation is changed from portrait to landscape the size of the uploaded PDFs looked just about 100% of printed size (see images below). This can be used as a zoom to enlarge any tables or charts that are printed in smaller font.

Newspapers

Newspapers display really well on the device. I subscribed to trials of both the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times (pictures in the gallery below).  Waking up in the morning to have the newspapers automatically delivered to the Kindle is a great experience. Although the articles themselves are displayed well, the interface for newspaper display leaves a lot to be desired.

[EDIT: Andrys a reader of the blog pointed out that the Kindle does allow random access to articles by going through the section list and browsing through a list of snippets in each section.] The section list page needs to be refined to look more like what the current Times Reader application from the New York Times looks like. i.e. a real cover page, rather than just a list of section names article snippets. The current system works but looks boring and for the price (about the same as the print version or even more expensive in some cases), consumers will want more.  The system currently requires subscribers to go through each article one by one rather than jump first select a section and then browse through a list of news snippets rather than using a graphically laid out page, before jumping to an article that looks interesting as most readers typically do. I don’t plan to subscribe permanently to either newspaper in the current incarnation. [EDIT: although the convenience of the online delivery is tempting.]

Textbooks

Amazon is yet to launch the textbook store for the Kindle. However, there are a few texts available already. I decided to try out one that was labeled “Optimized for Kindle DX.” Unfortunately, this turned out to be a particularly poorly done e-book with low resolution images (unlike other “optimized for DX” books that I tried). Although the book was quite usable (and also priced at about a third of the price of the paper version), the low resolution images that the publisher had utilized took away from the reading experience.

I will post more details on the textbook experience once Amazon launches the textbook store fully (expected before the fall) and business school texts start to appear online.

Web Browser:

The Kindle DX includes a basic web browser. Within the menus of the browser is a new desktop mode that displays full versions of webpages (when it works well, similar to a regular desktop browser).  I found the basic web browser usable but quite primitive. [EDIT: A reader Andrys pointed out that the basic browser on the Kindle is usable for most simple tasks such as googling something, looking at a non-graphics heavy wikipedia page, looking up a review etc.] The bandwidth available seemed really low as well (I’m wondering if Sprint/Amazon deliberately throttle the badwidth usage on the browser to keep network costs down. The desktop mode is very slow and not particularly reliable. The browser froze and restarted my kindle when I tried a graphics heavy wikipedia page using the desktop mode. The DX browser is meant for occasional / emergency use only, at least in its current “experimental” form. [EDIT: I just had my second Kindle reboot while trying to look at this blog page using the kindle in desktop mode.]

[UPDATE: I’ve found that the web browsing experience can vary a lot based on Sprint’s coverage. I did some wikipedia browsing today with some relatively heavy graphics as well but did not run into any problems and the pages loaded surprisingly quickly.]

[Update: PDF Reader Limitations

I tested the DX with a newer PDF book today (it was in Acrobat 8.x and contained many maps, images) and the Kindle failed to render most of the pages correctly. The book opened but a lot of the 3D graphics / maps did not show up and a warning appeared at the bottom of the DX saying: “Some elements on this page could not be displayed.”

I reprinted the file as Acrobat 6.x and the file works like magic, graphics, maps and all.

So, despite my initial thoughts, it looks like there are cases that PDFs don’t display correctly on the Kindle (although in my experience this is not the norm).

Additionally, on one PDF format book that I tried every other page appeared in a smaller font (not filling the page), this was corrected when I changed to landscape mode but reading in portrait became difficult. The contrast on the same book was fairly light as well.

I’ve added my thoughts on Manga and Magazines here https://srilankangsb.wordpress.com/2009/06/15/kindle-dx-manga-and-magazines/.

]

Text to Speech

The text-to-speech feature in its current form is not very good. The Adobe Acrobat read aloud feature (on my PC desktop) works much better and can be listened to. The Kindle version is really bad at pausing at the right places.

Conclusion

Despite the drawbacks that I cited above, I really like the Kindle DX. The reading experience is very good and the convenience of purchasing books via Amazon’s Whispernet service, pretty much anywhere, anytime is amazing. The DX’s size is perfect for case studies, scientific documents etc. and the lack of zoom should really not bother users because of the landscape mode that’s available. Although missing a few important features (like a better keyboard) this device provides a great platform for textbook and newspaper distribution. However, to utilize both these features requires first, waiting for the Kindle textbook store to launch (should be within the next month or so), and second, a better designed cover page for newspapers.

Questions from the Kindle Forum:

Does Text to Speech work on unconverted PDF? No, I would have been very surprised if this worked.

When you turn an unconverted pdf to landscape, how big do the letters get? It zooms by about 15-20%. The end result is about the same as what the PDF looks like when printed on letter sized paper.

Is the web browser better than the K2? I haven’t used the K2 but the Kindle DX has a desktop mode (with support for Javascript) as noted above. However, this mode crashed my kindle and I wouldn’t buy this version of the kindle hoping to use it as a browser. It’s slow, rather buggy and not a great experience.

How are the Speakers? Good, on text to speech, loud enough to fill a small room (similar to speakers found on smaller laptops). I haven’t tried them with music though, just with text to speech.

How comparable the screen size is to a page from a normal size hardcover book. I like reading books in hardcover, rather then paperback. I just wonder if the DX’s screen size is almost identical in average hardcover page size, appearance, etc? Very similar to hardcover book reading. I would say page size is almost identical to the typical hardcover but can probably show a little more text with the margins reduced (this can be changed using the Aa menu). The appearance of the text I think is even better than the regular hardcover page since the page is completely flat and the contrast is very good.

Does it creak? I shook it around a bit but couldn’t hear it creak, can’t say I tried too hard though 🙂 Feels very solid to me.

Does the text disappear with the sun? No. I found it very readable in direct sunlight. The only time it is difficult to read is if you have a light right behind you that is reflecting off the screen into your face.

Is the background/foreground contrast OK for comfortable reading with small size fonts? The contrast is just perfect and looks like the text is etched on the surface of the kindle. Reading small fonts is very easy. The display seems to be very high resolution as I can read the text even at the smallest font size without seeing “jaggies.”

Does it crash a lot? The only times it crashed on my so far is when I tried to view a graphics heavy wikipedia page with javascript enabled. Seems quite stable otherwise.

How difficult/cumbersome is it to have the navigation buttons on only one side, and to have to switch back and forth when using the keyboard to annotate? I found it very easy to use. I like to hold the kindle on my left arm and turn pages with the left as well (by putting my hand behind and around the DX), this works fine. The joystick works correctly in any orientation so if you wanted to turn it around and page turn on the left that will work well too.

The keyboard to annotate is a bit of a pain to use. The keys are small and stiff. I haven’t gotten used to the spacing yet.

I’d love to see some screenshots of how Mangle looks/works on the DX. I can only imagine the big screen would be even better for manga? I think Manga will look great. For an example of the image displaying abilities look at the screenshots from Akiko below. Sorry, I couldn’t transfer any manga to it to test out. I thought pictures look beautiful, like penciled etchings.

[Update: I’ve added my thoughts on Manga and Magazines here https://srilankangsb.wordpress.com/2009/06/15/kindle-dx-manga-and-magazines/.]

Does the DX properly scrape PDF metadata? Doesn’t seem to. It showed the titles on the cases I uploaded as the file name. PDFs display perfectly though.

Do 8.5 x 11″ documents seem “too small”? They don’t. I didn’t realize that it was smaller until I put the DX side by side with a printed version. In landscape mode you don’t see a full page but 8.5×11 documents look almost 100%. However, in my experience the portrait mode was perfectly readable as well.

Did they add folders? Unfortunately not. You can create folders on the drive in the USB mode to organize things, but they will not show up as folders on the kindle.

Are math fonts in Wikipedia articles readable with the Kindle DX, including the subscripts in equations? For example, could a student read and understand the article available here?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_­theory

Yes. In desktop mode the link above displays perfectly including all formulas subscripts etc. However the browser is slow and not very reliable in this mode.

Are math fonts in pdf articles readable with the Kindle DX, including in articles with very narrow margins?

Yes. fonts show up perfectly and PDFs work just the same as they would on your desktop. I was amazed by just how good the readability was. I didn’t try narrower margins than my cases below but I think it will be fine.

Is the print darker then a K2? I don’t have a K2 to compare but the print looks very dark and is a pleasure to read.

How is the cover? See my comments on the cover above. It works, uses up a minimum of space and the magnetic latch and the hinge lock system are great. Leather: not so nice.

Does it have a back light? AH. No.

Is it comfortable to hold and read (both landscape and vertical)? It’s not super comfortable for using one handed, but the increased screen size adds a lot of comfort to the actual reading. I’m glad I went with this size although sometimes I find myself wishing it was just a little lighter.

How many font sizes are there? 6, the largest one is gigantic! default is the third size.

Any new screen savers? Hmm, unfortunately don’t know since I don’t have a K2 but I really like the screen saver.

How well does it handle complex, multicolumn PDF’s? Very well, no problems at all.

What about images in PDF files? They display fine.

Are they large enough to see, is there a way to enlarge them if needed? They are large enough, but the only way to enlarge is by switching to landscape mode.

Most importantly, is highlighting and annotation possible in a PDF? Unfortunately not.

Can you zoom and pan on them? Just switching to landscape mode may not be enough magnification for image based PDFs and some charts/graphs. Unfortunately not, switching to landscape is the most you can do. Any PDF designed to be “printed” on letter size paper should be ok though.

How’s the contrast? Very good. It’s a pleasure to read.

Does the dictionary work on an unconverted pdf? No. There is no curser on PDFs. Only thing you can do is search through them or bookmark pages.

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Kindle DX Perfect for Business School Students

Amazon announced the new Kindle DX just about a week ago. There’s been a lot of talk in the blogosphere and in traditional media about whether the Kindle DX works for students. Most of the feedback has been something along the lines of: its too expensive, students resell textbooks – can’t do that on the Kindle (yet), no sharing of books, etc. Others have said no Color will limit the applications as a textbook reader.

The facts: there are no color readers coming out until at least late 2010 (or more likely sometime in 2011, if everything goes well). Therefore, if you are holding off on buying a Kindle DX because you need a reader in color, you will be waiting for a while.

Now for business schools specifically, why do I think the Kindle DX works very well?

1 ) Most business school textbooks are not overly reliant on Color – therefore a large portion if not all major textbooks will translate very easily to Kindle format: I expect most books to be available right at launch. This may also be backed by the fact that Darden was picked as one of the few schools piloting the reader in the fall.

2 ) Business school texts are expensive! – this will mean that the discount for the electronic versions of the books (in most cases in excess of 50%), will be particularly attractrive. B-school students buying the Kindle DX should see a pretty quick payback on the device based on these discounts.

3 ) Business school students tend to hang on to their textbooks. These books become a valuable resource to students after completing school. Therefore, the economics mentioned at the top from reselling, don’t apply as much here. This is a big plus since the Kindle DX allows you to keep a personal library of 3,300 textbooks in your hand at any time. In addition to this, Amazon will archive all your purchases in case you want to remove it from the device for additional space.

4 ) Case Studies: regardless of whether your school employs a teaching method that involves a large percentage of cases or a smaller percentage, MBA students will always run into a significant number of case studies that are good reference materials. The built in PDF reader on the new DX allows you to carry around thousands of cases and quickly access them with no unsightly piles of printed paper to lug around.

5 ) Homework/study groups: Study documents, papers, worksheets can easily be carried around for study group meetings, also works well for carrying around an email that you would otherwise have to print to take with you.

6 ) Business school students travel a lot: For travellers the Kindle DX is a great way to carry all of your books, cases, texts, reference material in a very small form factor, to read on planes, trains etc. This is a big plus and makes it particularly relavent for MBAs.

7 ) B School texts are huge (like most other textbooks): which translates easily into the Kindle format where you carry one .3 inch Kindle instead of a bunch of 2-3 inch textbooks.

8 ) Instant access to books: if someone in class or anywhere else mentions an interesting book to you, you don’t have to write the title down and look it up later, take out the kindle and buy it immediately with instant delivery over Whispernet. This will mean you will read a lot more books and some books also have their first chapter available as a free preview, you can take a look before you commit to buy. The wireless delivery works almost anywhere that Sprint has coverage, at no cost to you. The purchase cost includes the wireless access charges.

9 ) Not as big a plus but for b-school students who subscribe to the Wall Street Journal or other newspapers, the Kindle DX provides a perfect viewer for it. Every morning students can wake up to find the morning news delivered automatically to the Kindle.

10 ) Free wireless broadband access to a browser, this is not a huge plus since the browser included in the kindle is primitive but its still a good tool to quickly check your e-mail from class, and the browser software will only be improved over time.

To address a couple of other commonly mentioned cons for the Kindle DX:

1 ) It’s too expensive:  In the context of the cost of textbooks and materials for business school and more generally the cost of an MBA, the cost of the Kindle DX ($489) is really not that much. Based on your book buying and textbook buying habits, you will likely make back this cost over a period of 6 months to 2 years.

2 ) You could buy a $3xx Netbook and do everything a Kindle does and more: This is just not true. The reason that the Kindle costs $489 to make and the reason why its so popular is the e-ink screen. This is a technology that recreates the paper reading experience almost identically. There is no back-light, there is no glare and provides a perfect paper like experience. Yes, you can do a lot of other things on a Netbook but it is not convenient and does not provide a good reading experience for books.

3 ) I’m going to wait for a competing reader (Plastic Logic, Sony, etc): The reader is nifty hardware, true. However, the success of a device like this, early on, is heavily dependent on the content available to it. Amazon has put all its muscle behind the Kindle with 275,000+ books already available for it. Unlike the 0.5 + million available for the Sony reader, most of the Kindle books are popular current books, not free/public domain books.  Therefore the Kindle is the one to get, at least from how the landscape looks right now. The other big advantage is the instant wireless delivery via Whispernet mentioned above, which is not available through any other competing device.

4 ) I need to see my textbooks in color: As mentioned above, unfortunately technology to support color e-ink is pretty far away. Optimistic forecasts put the technology as ready next year, but most likely will be 2011 at least.

To sum it up, I think the Kindle DX is perfect for business school students. If you agree or disagree, I would love to know why, please leave a comment below.

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Amazon wants 70% of Newspaper Revenue? Wow.

Wow.  It wasn’t too long ago that we were talking about the Kindle DX as a newspaper savior but it seems  like Amazon has other plans.

Dallas Morning News CEO James Moroney told a Senate subcommittee that the Kindle isn’t a “platform that’s going to save newspapers in the near term.” Moroney said that Amazon wants 70% of subscription revenue from newspapers, and also requires content owners to give Amazon the right to republish content to other devices.

That is a BIG ask. Even Apple takes only 30% of app store revenue.

The only reason that newspapers liked (or I thought they liked) the Kindle was because it helped them take out a large portion of the distribution cost and offer papers at a lower price to consumers (i.e. get more subscriptions, more updates, cheaper).

However, if Amazon is asking for 70% of revenue it would basically replace the current distribution + retail markup costs with the “Amazon fee” basically bringing newspapers to status quo.

But when you really think about it, its far from status quo because, newspapers make money on Ads on the paper version while the kindle newspapers have no ads (at least the current Kindle 2 versions), therefore Newspapers are substituting higher revenue paper customers with lower revenue kindle subscribers.

This explains why the NYT chairman during the press conference yesterday labeled this as an “experiment” and said that discount subscriptions will only be available in areas where the regular paper edition delivery is currently not available.

All this makes no sense to me. It seems really short sighted on Amazon’s part. Maybe they will come around as they realize that these economics don’t work for Newspapers.

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Amazon announces new larger screen Kindle DX: it’s official! $489

[UPDATE: Analysis of why the Kindle DX might be perfect for business school here]

In a news conference today, Amazon announced a larger screen kindle that will also have several partnerships with universities and newspaper companies.

Available for pre-order NOW for $489. No delivery estimate yet except that it is Summer 2009, but apparently sometime soon.

Jeff Bezos started with some general info about the Kindle.

Kindle has available 35% of all books that Amazon sells and they have added 45,000 new books in the last 3 months. They’ve started at the head (with the books people actually want to read) vs. the free / out of print books that others have added.

Features:

The display is 2 and a half times the size of the Kindle 2. Built in PDF reader, no need to pan, zoom, scroll etc.

9.7-inch display with auto-rotate, 3G wireless, 3.3GB of storage, native PDF support, $9.99 or less NYT bestsellers, no wireless contract

Auto Rotate: Automatically switch between portrait and landscape modes.

Kindle DX has reached agreements with three leading textbook publishers: 60% of higher education textbooks will be covered. Pearson, Cengage Learning and Wiley.

Idea is to have students with smaller backpacks, less load, easier access.

Schools trialing the device: Arizona State, Case Western, Princeton, Reed College, UVA – Darden

Kindle device trials with New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe – beginning this summer.

NYT, Boston Globe and San Francisco Chronicle are on board: they will offer reduced prices with long-term subscription commitments.

NYT chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr. called the Kindle DX an “experiment” and made a remark about offering discounted kindle plans where paper delivery is not available: haa..

There were also some hiccups when the camera kept showing a unreadable mirror image of the kindle on the screen for a while.

I know this is very expensive (I was hoping a device in the same price range as the Kindle 2, but that’s probably wishful thinking). I have been waiting for this for a while, my pre-order is in! The $49 case seems like a LOT though.

Anyone else think this is the perfect way to keep all the course documents and cases organized with hopefully some heavy discounts on business school texts?

Images and information courtesy of Engadget and Gizmodo.

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Amazon Kindle DX: 9.7 Inch Screen?

Engadget has managed to get a hold of what is believed to be pictures and specs of the new larger screen kindle.  Apparently the Kindle that will be released tomorrow will be targeted towards the education crowd, will include a 9.7 inch display, a built in PDF reader and the ability to make better annotations, all absolute requirements for a student.

It remains to be seen how accurate these “leaks” are, but I wouldn’t be surprised if this is pretty close.

Follow the link for more pictures.

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Larger Kindle Coming Wednesday with Textbooks!

According to those in the know at both the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times a larger screen kindle is about to be announced by Amazon this Wednesday (a lot sooner than I expected them to). This should be a standard letter paper (8.5 x 11) sized reader, still featuring a gray scale display I think. I know we would like to see a color display but price at the current point in time probably stops that from being a reality.

Amazon has called a mysterious press conference in New York for Wednesday which will almost definitely result in the announcement of a larger screen reading device. It seems the pitch is more towards newspaper companies, focusing this as a chance for the dying paper business to make a revival. At least that’s what the NYT (which is partnering with Amazon for this initiative) seems to believe.

The WSJ article focuses on the textbook aspect, citing the CIO of Case Western regarding a trial of the large screen kindle textbooks that will happen at the school this fall. The textbook trial will also involve six universities, Case Western, Pace, Princeton, Reed, Darden School at UVA, and Arizona State.

It’s good to see Darden in the trials, suggesting that textbook publishers for business books are on board with the plan.

Wednesday’s press conference will be at Pace as well and will apparently include NYT publisher Arthur Sulzberger on stage with Jeffery Bezos.

I’m excited!

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