Amazon's Kindle DX now available for pre-order

That was fast! As soon as rumors started about a new, larger Kindle due from Amazon this week, the device appeared for pre-order on Amazon's front page. The Kindle DX has a 9.7" display that makes it suitable for reading PDFs and websites in their original layouts. As we predicted, Amazon is also pushing the DX as the ideal reader for newspapers and magazines.

The DX's screen orientation changes automatically, allowing you to turn it to widescreen for website viewing. At $489, it's quite a bit pricier than the regular Kindle, but its storage space is also more than twice that of the smaller device. No announcement on the textbook angle we were hearing about, but we'll wait and see what happens. We'll also wait and see what the DX does for newspaper readership. Can it boost the newspaper business in a way that the original Kindle couldn't, just by having a screen that might be big enough to do justice to newspaper layouts? Time will tell.

Tags: amazon, books, e-reader, hardware, kindle-dx, newspapers