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* Photo: Photo: Jeff Mermelstein; location courtesy of Delta Airlines; clouds: Corbis * In February, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos unveiled the Kindle 2 at New York City's Morgan Library. By all indications (Amazon has yet to offer an API to its own financials), the update of his electronic reading device defied the recession and sold tons. You would have thought that Bezos would take a rest. But in May he was back in New York, this time at Pace University—with another Kindle.
He called it the Kindle DX, but it should have been called the Kindle XL, because the newcomer is all about size. The original model's e-ink screen measured 6 inches diagonally, roughly equivalent to a typical paperback. The DX has a 9.7-inch screen, about the size of a hardcover. That's two and half times more reading area. The real trick is that Amazon has supersized the Kindle without making it bulky—the new guy is still only about a third of an inch thick. It's very easy to hold.
Amazon is marketing the DX, priced at a gulp-inducing $489, to some specific users: college students, professionals who read a lot of documents, and consumers of newspapers and magazines. One of the speakers at the May event was New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr., who spoke briefly of plans to offer special Kindle subscription deals to people living in places where the paper doesn't deliver. (Aren't those the places where people don't care about The New York Times?) He then retreated to the luxurious new building the Times Company built before the Internet put it on the verge of bankruptcy.
But I'm less interested in subscription models than in presentation. The original Kindle—the first truly connected e-reader—made me think these devices would evolve into sleek, inexpensive gadgets that could combine the richness of print with the ability to perform neat tricks of the digital era, like animate graphics and target ads. If you've seen Minority Report, you know what I mean.
You could subscribe to newspapers and magazines on the first Kindle, but the experience was awful, requiring painstaking manipulation of a weird scroll bar to find the article you wanted. For the Kindle 2, Amazon improved the software and upgraded the screen to grayscale so the photos would no longer look like fetal ultrasounds. But its plodding menu-based interface still made navigating newspapers difficult, and the rich graphic quality that makes magazines such an indulgence is totally missing. Even the flashiest print publication looks like The New England Journal of Medicine. So I was disappointed to discover that the launch version of the DX handles newspapers and magazines exactly the same way its predecessor does.
Here's what we really need to make print publications shine: a Super Kindle, made by Amazon or someone else. It would be an inexpensive (cheap enough to lose), always-on device with deep, hi-res color, e-ink, and a touchscreen. You could browse through lush pages by finger-flipping. You'd be able to point at a story on a carefully choreographed front page to access a gorgeously designed article. Tap an ad and an animated demo would begin.
When I showed the DX to Wired's editor in chief, he rotated it to landscape mode to see whether it was wide enough to convey the experience of a magazine spread—it covered less than half the territory. Even the expanded screen could deliver only a shrunken facsimile. But then he took the leather binder that Amazon sells to cover the reader and flipped it open. The folio fit the open pages of Wired almost precisely. Imagine that binder crammed full of silicon and liquid crystal—that's the form factor of the future periodical.
A device like that is the last best hope paper-based companies have for coping with the reality that paper is doomed. Color e-ink displays and other advances are brewing in the labs. But progress is slow. Is the Super Kindle five years away? Ten? That may be too late for some publications struggling right now. But it might be a ground-up launching pad for the newspapers of tomorrow.
