Online retail giant Amazon.com unveiled a large-screen version of its popular Kindle electronic reader today designed for newspapers, magazines and textbooks.
The Kindle DX features a screen which at 9.7 inches (24.6 centimetres) is 2.5 times larger than the six-inch (15.24 cm) screen on the earlier versions of the Kindle.
Amazon said the latest Kindle, which will ship this summer, has a built-in PDF document reader and 3.3 gigabytes of memory which can store up to 3,500 books compared with 1,500 books for the Kindles 1 and 2.
It said top US and international magazines and newspapers and over 1,500 blogs would be available for downloading on the new Kindle.
'The larger electronic paper display with 16 shades of gray has more area for graphic-rich content such as professional and personal documents, newspapers and magazines, and textbooks,' Amazon said.
The company also announced that The New York Times and The Washington Post plan to offer the Kindle DX to readers as part of a pilot programme.
Like other US newspapers, the Times and Post have been struggling to find new sources of revenue as print advertising income falls and readers go online to read the news for free.
Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, US newspaper and magazine publisher Hearst and California-based start-up Plastic Logic are among the other companies known to be developing e-readers for periodicals.
Amazon said three of the leading US textbook publishers Cengage Learning, Pearson and Wiley would begin offering textbooks through the online Kindle Store this summer.
It said Arizona State University, Case Western Reserve University, Princeton University, Reed College, and Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia would launch a trial programmes to make Kindle DX devices available to students.
