Amazon.com Inc., aiming to broaden the appeal of its Kindle electronic reader, unveiled a model whose screen is 2.5 times bigger than the current version and is designed for newspapers and textbooks. Customers can preorder the device for $489, with shipments arriving this summer, Amazon.com, the world's largest Internet retailer, said today. The New York Times, Washington Post and Boston Globe will sell the reader at a discount to subscribers who live in areas without home delivery.
Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos, who unveiled the device at an event in New York today, wants to establish Amazon.com as the leader in the market for electronic books and newspapers as the use of digital media increases. A larger screen may make the Kindle attractive to a wider array of consumers and set the device apart from rivals such as a reader from Sony Corp.
"Amazon is rushing to get this out to shore up its position as a market leader," said Sarah Rotman Epps, an analyst at Forrester Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts. "In the next year, there will be multiple devices like this that will also have bigger screens and will be able to support newspapers."
Amazon.com rose 9 cents to $81.99 at 4 p.m. New York time in Nasdaq Stock Market trading. The stock has gained 60 percent this year.
The new Kindle has a 9.7-inch screen, and it can be used in landscape and portrait modes. It also displays PDF documents and holds 3,500 books, compared with 1,500 for the regular Kindle.
Academic Textbooks
Amazon.com will also start a pilot program for the Kindle with universities including Princeton, Arizona State and Case Western Reserve.
About 50 students at Cleveland, Ohio-based Case Western will use chemistry, computer science and English textbooks on the new Kindle. Their academic performance will be compared to students using traditional textbooks, said Lev Gonick, chief information officer at the school.
Amazon.com doesn't disclose how much money it has made from the Kindle, only saying sales have exceeded its estimates. The company has struggled to keep the reader in stock in its first two years.
Mark Mahaney, an analyst at Citigroup Inc. in San Francisco, estimates the Kindle will generate about $1.2 billion in revenue by 2010. Analysts predict Amazon.com will have more than $22 billion in sales this year.
Sony, Hearst Competition
Amazon.com has run into legal issues since it introduced the Kindle 2 this year. Discovery Communications Inc., operator of the television channel Animal Planet, sued Amazon.com in March for allegedly infringing on a patent for "electronic book security and copyright protection system."
In February, Amazon.com changed a read-aloud feature after the Authors Guild said that the company wasn't paying anyone for audio rights. Publishers can now choose to activate the function on a case-by-case basis.
That hasn't slowed Amazon.com's push into the digital-book market. In March, the company introduced an application for Apple Inc.'s iPhone and iPod Touch media player. Last month, it bought Lexcycle Inc., which can export portable document files and Word documents to other reading devices.
The expansion into newspapers and textbooks comes as new entrants are targeting the digital-reader market. Polymer Vision, based in Eindhoven, Netherlands, and Plastic Logic Inc., in Mountain View, California, are both building readers for release later this year.
Sony, which introduced a reader before Amazon.com, struck a deal with Google Inc. in March. Hearst Corp., the publisher of the San Francisco Chronicle and Cosmopolitan, has invested in a company that's creating a reading device.
Amazon.com has said there is room for creativity with electronic books because the industry is still young. So far, the Kindle's success has helped the company invest more in the device's development, said Sandeep Aggarwal, an analyst at Collins Stewart LLC in San Francisco.
"They can justify product enhancements more quickly," Aggarwal said. "There is more room for innovation, particularly when all the reading devices are at early stages."
SOURCE: Bloomberg
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I was a little wary at first when purchasing this product because I was afraid I would miss the feel of turning pages. Within the first hour of using my Kindle this was absolutely not a problem. I actually have a few paperbacks I haven't finished yet and am seriously considering buying them for the Kindle because of the sheer convenience of it all. I love that I can look up definitions, make notes and mark pages with just the touch of a few buttons. It also holds my page on every book that I am reading which is really nice. I have always enjoyed reading but I found that I read much more often now and that I am willing to try books that I might not have before. Being able to view samples of books has made me a much more adventurous reader. I have books that are special to me that I will keep a bound copy of but I would never go back to reading without a Kindle!