The NY Times posted an article this week hailing the imminent release an XL version of the Kindle geared toward the newspaper loving and textbook toting crowds. The brainchild of Bezos & Co., the Kindle has yet to be anything more than a dimly lit flame. Price, subscription pricing, design, durability, and a struggle with the content providers have all hampered a more widespread adoption of the e-reader as pointed out in this previous post. I have not purchased a Kindle because of the price point and content restrictions ala DRM. At the $359 price point of the Kindle 2 you could get a more versatile Asus netbook at the same price.
As time goes by the Kindle may just be a bridge device to the Next Big Thing in digital media and it seems that Jeff Bezos is hedging his bets in this direction. Amazon recently acquired the startup company Stanza who had produced an eBook app for the iPhone and then immediately turned around and released an Amazon branded iPhone app for current Kindle users. Maybe Amazon knows that the true competition lies ahead not with competing eBook readers (Did you hear that Sony?) but with the iPhone, the rumored Apple Tablet, or inexpensive netbooks.
There is still hope for the Kindle in a market that has not been dominated by the Apple arsenal or netbooks. The textbook market. The technological advantage of a high contrast, electronic ink screen for easy reading is a natural fit for digesting hundreds of pages of reading. The sheer portability and size of the device also translates into a lightened load for the students. The only question mark for the design of the new XL Kindle kindle DX will be the durability factor as it gets tossed around from class to class. Universities are already lining up for pilot programs with the new Kindle according to the Wall Street Journal. The names include heavy hitters like Princeton, the University of Virginia, and Arizona State University. The next time you find yourself wandering the halls of Princeton, see if you can spot any backpacks.
Update: Amazon has officially announced the kindle DX today (4/6/09). Get all of the techy tidbits here. How many newly minted kindle 2 customers are steaming mad right now?
