Amazon is revealing its third Kindle today at a jam-packed press conference in New York City. The new Kindle, which we first caught wind of last year, is expected to have a larger screen to be used for reading newspapers, magazines, and textbooks. (Don’t expect it to save the newspaper industry, though). Arthur Sullzberger, Jr. of the New York Times is in the house I’ll be liveblogging the event, which should start any minute now.
Notes:
Bezos just stepped on stage.
The Kindle vision is every book ever printed available in 60 seconds. 18 months ago launched with 90K books, 200K books with launch of Kindle 2, added another 45K books.
Where we have Kindle editions, Kindle is now 35% of books sold for those titles. It took us 14 years to build up our physical books business. We find this very encouraging.
Bezos introduces the Kindle DX, built in PDF reader. No zooming, no panning, just read. shows off cookbooks, a picture of Sushi doesn’t look too appetizing in gray-scale, however, atlases, and textbooks.
announcing partnership with three top textbook publishers which account for 60% of textbook sales (Pearson, Wiley and Cengage Learning).
5 universities have agreed to pilot Arizona State, Princeton, Reed, U of Virginia, Case Western Reserve
Newspapers have been popular. This summer 3 newspapers have agreed to pilot Kindle DX for a reduced price in return for long term commitments for subscriptions, NYT, Washington Post and Boston Globe. But only for people who live in places where local delivery is not available.
Bezos is showing off PDF documents. pilots charts, sheet music, a document from Bezos’ library on rocket thruster. “This is the type of document I would have wasted ink toner on.”
With a large screen Bezos is showing that with teh larger screen newspaper headlines can now be accompanied with the first few lines of text when scanning headlines. For textbooks, you can change the number of lines and font size that it displays.
Kindle has a 9.7 inch display with autorotation. 3G wireless access to 275K books
Native PDF support
3.3 GB of memory
$9.99 or less for NYT best sellers, discount subscription coming for newspapers
$489 for Kindle DX versus $359 for 6 inch display
Here are some pics:
um, nice spelling?
Dont be an idiot. He’s live blogging. You either get news as quickly as possible or you can wait while he spell checks. Ass.
Oh, I was told blogging is “real” journalism. My mistake, no reason to sound authoritative.
Yeah, because “real” Journalist never make mistakes. Hell if the only mistakes that the NY Times made were typos I’d consider buying a subscription.
Any word of Kindle coming to Canada???
Any word if they have a realistic price point?
489 isn’t unreasonable for a textbook reader. maybe unreal for a leisure reader, but for text or referance books which already run 100+ it’s not a huge price, especially if it reduces the text book price.
Reduce textbook cost? Yeah, good luck with that. I work in the textbook publishing industry and there are no plans to reduce the price of the books.
Is it impossible to spell check? Firefox does it automatically, Adium does it automatically on IM, OS X does it automatically, what’s the issue?
It’s for authenticity
some of you people should get a life!
So what if theres a few spelling mistake.
Thanks for the good work TechCrunch
It’s not only spelling mistakes, there is a consistent lack of technical knowledge and background research, in a majority of articles posted here.
No one is forcing you to read this blog.
Using the “no one is forcing you” cop out does not work. Clearly, comments like these are taken to heart, as the mistakes have magically been corrected. It’s a good thing.
Any webcast of this event?
any hash tag for twitter? #kindle? #newkindle?
How about #amazonwasteoftime
From Quill and Quire: Kindle 2 not coming to Canada … http://is.gd/ji1v Amazon FAIL! Big time Fail!
Kindle DX: http://www.amaz...n/dp/B0015TCML0
Whats a kindle? Is it something you use to start a fire?
Amazing coverage and kindly is impressive
Glad to see my alma mater, Case Western, is still on the cutting edge of technology
Right on the foreskin of technology.
LOL! Best comment of the day.
awesome, i wish i wasn’t graduating soon and would be able to benefit from the textbook aspect of the new kindle. thanks for live blogging this!
I’m currently using the Kindle2 without whispernet in Singapore. The PDF support is almost enough to convince me to upgrade so I can finally stop jumping through GhostScript-PNG hoops to read my current technical PDF library…. but still no WiFi !? WTF!?
I want one!
Has Kindle been used to bypass publishers and market directly to consumers ? I like to see a story on this if it has.
Hi there,
Ask when the DX will be available for other students. An official launch so to speak. Especially for UK!
Thanks.
Ah, flight supplements would be brilliant on a Kindle, they are constantly being updated.
After every sentence Amazon should say, “but it only works in the USA.”
“We have an overly-priced useless product… but it only works in the USA.”
“This could revolutionize the publishing industry… but it only works in the USA.”
“You’re not actually buying anything when you purchase a Kindle book from Amazon… but it only works in the USA.”
Except that it works in the whole f#$king world. Only the EVDO-based functions (OTA book purchases) are limited to the US, because the rest of the world doesn’t have EVDO systems.
It’s looking pretty decent. It’s actually quite a bit cheaper than the one I am considering (the iRex Digital Reader 1000, which is $850.)
However, being in Canada, I’m guessing I’ll be losing a lot of functionality.
But, I need an e-ink device to read textbooks and other PDF stuff with. This one might be worth it.
Have a look at Plastic Logic’s offering… No word on a price point yet though. Could be another failure.
http://www.plasticlogic.com
Nice to see pdf’s but when is this or equivalent going to go full bore and replace the laptop as our walkin’ around computer. . . Intelligent cell phones are cute but this new size is ideal for the next gen of full functioning portable computers.
I really don’t understand how a reader can cost that much.
$489 a Kindle seems a real rip-off.
Plus, another $49. for the cover, so lame. Nearly $50. for a cover? Gimme a break…
Expensive for the consumer, and expensive for the publisher too.
I’m a publisher of specialist books. Amazon already takes 55% of retail (compared to ordinary booksellers taking 35-40%). For Kindle they bump that up to 65% – and they expect publishers to do it at a reduced retail-price, too.
With POD production, the print-cost isn’t high – not enough to cover another 10% loss on margin (i.e. c.25% of return). It’s what’s known as parasitic sales: as a small publisher, the more you sell via Kindle, the more money you lose.
Looks good, but ultimately it’s bad news all round. For everyone except Jeff Bezos, of course.
Oh, I was told blogging is “real” journalism. My mistake, no reason to sound authoritative.
If you want a real blog with real journalism then read Politico, this is TechCrunch after all.
P.S. TC, I still love you.
this is great news, been dreaming of a big-screen kindle. check out my post at: http://tinyurl.com/c869hb
I am a college student, and I would never buy a Kindle. I wrote a blog post about it at http://www.schoolshifblog.com ….Basically, it is too expensive, ugly and impractical for a college student to use.
Being a pilot the fifth photo convinced me!
Once they get a color version with 100GB of storage space, I might buy it at $489. Until then, iPhone/iPod, laptops, or a good old fashion book.
Effect on public libraries and their users if books go electronic ?
I’m actually pretty excited about Kindle being bigger. As a musician, I’ve spent years looking for a way to digitize my sheet music collection to .pdf and house it all in a single device, indexed.
They really should consider that as a market. We can go 1-device with things like books, movies, CDs… sheet music is one of the only things that doesn’t have a paperless solution, and there are thousands of musicians in the world.
For that price I would expect a much better configuration (and design). 3.3 GB of memory, come on now, books and newspaper can have images too. And for $10 I would rather get a really copy of a book. Until they can figure out a way to use electronic ink, I don’t see the Kindle replacing that many books (especially at the price point).
Wow!
Amazon is offering refurbished Kindle DX for $399.99! I’m gonna buy mine right now.
For that price I would expect a much better configuration (and design). 3.3 GB of memory, come on now, books and newspaper can have images too. And for $10 I would rather get a really copy of a book. Until they can figure out a way to use electronic ink, I don’t see the Kindle replacing that many books (especially at the price point).