Amazon.com unveils a new, bigger Kindle
SAN FRANCISCO - Aiming to broaden the appeal of its Kindle electronic reader, Amazon.com Inc. yesterday unveiled a model whose screen is 2 1/2 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 yesterday.
The Boston Globe, The New York Times, and The Washington Post will sell the reader at a discount to subscribers who live in areas without home delivery.
Chief executive Jeff Bezos, who unveiled the device at an event in New York yesterday, 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, Mass.
"In the next year, there will be multiple devices like this that will also have bigger screens and will be able to support newspapers," she said.
Amazon.com shares rose 9 cents to $81.99. 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 current model.
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-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 does not disclose how much money it has made from the Kindle, saying only that 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.
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 the company wasn't paying anyone for audio rights. Publishers can now choose to activate the function on a case-by-case basis.
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, Calif., 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, has invested in a company that's creating a reading device. 