The biggest complaint about electronic books such as Amazon's Kindle is that their screens are too small to effectively display magazine content. Newspaper editors also balk at the inability to lay out a page of headlines and stories, which is needed to give readers an immediate sense of what's a big story and what isn't.
E-readers are about to make the leap to the next generation. Amazon.com and a group of partners that includes The New York Times will launch a big-screen e-reader on Wednesday at an event in Manhattan.
The Times tactfully mentioned this in a story about next-generation "big-screen e-readers." However, instead of a using a photo of Amazon's new reader, the Times ran the shot shown here of the Plastic Logic Reader, a big-screen e-reader built by startup Plastic Logic. The device is being tested for launch next year by the Times' crosstown rival, The Wall Street Journal. In addition, rumors of an Apple reader are considered credible by Apple-watchers.
The new devices from Amazon and Plastic Logic are meant to display not only books, but also newspapers and magazines. Another potentially lucrative market: Textbooks. A printed copy of Paul Samuelson's Economics sells for $150 at Amazon. For millennials accustomed to reading from screens instead of books, digital versions of their required titles for school might be preferable enough to justify charging much higher prices than e-reader versions of best-selling novels, which can cost as little as $9.99 on the Kindle.
Plastic Logic's promotional photos suggest that Amazon's new reader, which hasn't yet been shown in public, may be too big for some people. It's possible that Amazon will continue to offer the existing Kindle 2, giving buyers a choice of a paperback-sized reader or an "XL" Kindle with a supersize screen. Either way, publishers are coming to terms with the continuing decline of printed publications, and are looking for digital platforms that will make their content sing so well that someone, somehow will pay for it.
(Update: Engadget has photos of a device said to be Amazon's new reader, called Kindle DX, with a 9.7-inch display compared to the Kindle 2's six-inch screen.)
Photo: Plastic Logic
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