These rather blurry pictures come to us by way of the folks at Engadget, and to them from an anonymous tipster. They show the new Kindle, which will probably be announced tomorrow.
The details: a 9.7-inch display, bigger than the six inches of the regular Kindle; a PDF reader (at last) and a new “annotation” function, which is added to the the notes and highlighting features of the current model. As I speculated yesterday, this doesn’t look like the saviour of newspapers as much as a way for Amazon to clean up in the textbook market. Textbook sized pages? Check. Note-adding capabilities? Check. Support for standard e-documents (PDF)? Check, check, check.
We don’t have long to wait now, as the Amazon announcement, whatever it may be, is tomorrow. A textbook Kindle, though, could be a huge hit. Lighter than the books it replaces, possibly even cheaper than those books and targeted at a consumer who neither cares for the “romance” of dead trees nor for endlessly flipping through paper pages to find their notes. This, we think, could be the real tipping point for the e-book.
Still unknown: What this large-screen e-book reader will actually be called. Engadget refers to it as the “Kindle DX,” but without citing any sources, so we assume that they’re making up names, same as everyone else. GigaOm’s Om Malik calls it Kindle HD, and we prefer the more direct and American Kindle XL. What do you think, readers?
Amazon Kindle DX to feature 9.7-inch display? Update: Pictures! [Engadget. Thanks, John!]
