Textbooks

As we predicted earlier this week, Amazon is aiming this device at the educational market and has reached deals with three major textbook publishers: Pearson, Wiley, and Cengage Learning.

Newspapers

Amazon also announced that the New York Times, Boston Globe, and Washington Post have signed deals with Amazon and that these papers will begin trials with reduced prices for Kindle DX users who agree to long-term subscription commitments later this summer. It looks like these discounts will only be available to users who live in areas where printed versions of these papers are not readily available.

During today's event, the New York Times' chairman, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., argued that the new Kindle finally offers "the same satisfying experience as the reading of a printed newspaper." It remains to be seen, though, if newspaper readers are indeed clamoring for a device that simply copies the experience of reading a traditional, dead-tree newspaper. It is also important to note that Sulzberger called the new deal with Amazon an "experiment," and the success of this experiment will surely also depend on how much of a discount on the Kindle the papers are willing to give to their readers.

Not a Game-Changer

Judging from what we have seen so far, we don't think that the Kindle DX will be a major game-changer in the eTextbook market or for the newspaper business. Besides the bigger screen, there is nothing really new in the Kindle DX, though having a native PDF reader will surely be useful to a lot of users.

The newspapers' discount offer seems a bit timid, to say the least (though we still don't have all the details yet). And we still have serious doubts that the Kindle is the ideal device for reading textbooks (though we have to admit that some of our readers are more enthusiastic about a large-screen Kindle for eTextbooks than we are).