Press Conference According to rumors, Amazon will announce on Wednesday a much larger Kindle called the Kindle DX. The press con­fer­ence will be held on Wednesday, May 6 at 10:30am EDT at Pace University, the his­toric 19th cen­tury head­quar­ters to the New York Times.

9.7″ Big The Kindle DX will sport a 9.7″ E Ink dis­play. That’s 3.7″ larger than the cur­rent Kindle 2.0. With the larger dis­play the num­ber of pix­els will cer­tainly grow, but I don’t have a clue as to how many. The larger Kindle DX will cer­tainly be cater­ing to users that want to read text­books and news­pa­pers on their Kindles. Are you a stu­dent? Whether you’re in high school or in col­lege you’re prob­a­bly lug­ging a lot of books around and hav­ing to choose which books to actu­ally take to school. Aren’t the books big too? And expen­sive? I’m not sure if the Kindle DX will help in the price depart­ment all that much but it cer­tainly will sig­nif­i­cantly lighten your load. Your back will thank you too. There will cer­tainly be a DRM fea­ture so you can’t share your $100 cal­cu­lus text­book with your friend. I wouldn’t be sur­prised if sev­eral text­book pub­lish­ers announce elec­tronic ver­sions that will be avail­able to the Kindle DX.

PDF One nifty fea­ture of the Kindle DX will be a fea­ture that cur­rent Kindle own­ers have long been ask­ing for: a built-in PDF reader. What does this mean for you? As long as you have a PDF printer installed on your com­puter you can ‘print’ web­pages, Word doc­u­ments, etc. into a PDF doc­u­ment. And the Kindle DX will be able to dis­play it. Very cool that should have been in the very first Kindle. I’m glad Amazon finally got it.

NYT The New York Times will sup­pos­edly offer a $9.95/mo sub­scrip­tion for the Kindle DX. That’s a bit cheaper than the paper ver­sion of $13.99/mo. The elec­tronic ver­sion will also help save some trees and a lot on dis­tri­b­u­tion costs: no paper­boys hav­ing to throw the news­pa­pers at  you if you hap­pen to be awake that early in the morn­ing and sip­ping cof­fee right in front of your front door.

The mar­ket for ebook read­ers is heat­ing up. Hearst announced that it is work­ing on an ebook reader that will replace the news­pa­per and have enough space for ads, a major rev­enue source for news­pa­pers. Also a Wall Street Journal arti­cle reports that sev­eral pub­lish­ing indus­try exec­u­tives are estab­lish­ing a group to set their own sub­scrip­tion rates and not leave that up to a mid­de­man such as Amazon. There is also the rumor that Apple might be ready­ing a net­book of its own that could eas­ily eat into the ebook reader mar­ket if the dis­play is good enough and the bat­tery lasts long enough. I think Apple is work­ing on a 10″ ultra­w­ide net­book and will call it the iBook. Just like Steve, the iBook will return after a hiatus.

Source: Engadget