Amazon.com Inc. on Wednesday plans to unveil a new version of its Kindle e-book reader with a larger screen and other features designed to appeal to periodical and academic textbook publishers, according to people familiar with the matter.

Beginning this fall, some students at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland will be given large-screen Kindles with textbooks for chemistry, computer science and a freshman seminar already installed, said Lev Gonick, the school’s chief information officer. The university plans to compare the experiences of students who get the Kindles and those who use traditional textbooks, he said. [via wsj]

So what do we already know about what people are calling the “Kindle DX”? The following information has pretty much been confirmed:

• The 6-inch display has been increased to 9.7-inches
• There is an included PDF reader
• Added ability for note-taking and annotation
• The price of newspaper subscriptions might be dropped. Specifically mentioned was the NY Times, which makes sense because Arthur Sulzberger Jr. is said to be making an appearance tomorrow.
• The web browser will have improved functionality, though it’s not clear if this will be over the 3G Whispernet service
• Amazon has made deals to have the new Kindle in the hands of college students for the fall semester. Specifically Pace, Princeton, Reed, University of Virginia, and Arizona State were mentioned.

The big hope is to somehow reverse the fortunes of the tumbling print news industry, allowing publishers to charge subscription fees and load their pages with advertising. Of course, they’ll have to compete with free online versions of the same publications that are quite readable on today’s portables and handheld devices like the iPhone. There’s also the issue of having to buy and carry around yet another device, which is likely to be just as expensive (if not more) as the Kindle 2 – unless Amazon and its partners offer some kind of subsidy [via techspot]

Korea-based LG Display (LGD) will reportedly offer lower-than-average prices for electrophoretic displays (EPDs) in order to land orders from China electronic reading device (e-book) makers, according to market sources.

According to LGD, the company has been mass producing EPDs since the first half of 2008, but it declined to comment on other related information.

LGD’s EPD technology is licensed from Philips, the same source for Taiwan-based Prime View International (PVI), the sources said. LGD’s electrophoresis materials are also supplied by E-Ink, the sources added. [via digitimes]

Media mogul Rupert Murdoch, the guy behind Fox and other media outlets, says that he is investing in a Kindle competitor. And it’s going to be even more powerful than Amazon’s offering. Murdoch was decidedly cryptic in the interview, not providing very much in terms of details, but the message was there.

More specifically, Rupert Murdoch was quoted as saying:

“We need new models. The first inkling of it is the Kindle. You can get the whole paper there. And you can get the whole of The Wall Street Journal on your BlackBerry. We’re investing in a new device that has a bigger screen, four-color, and you can get everything there.”

Murdoch did not say that News Corp. was creating a device of its own. Instead, they are in “exploratory” talks to invest in another company that can then develop new e-reader and e-ink technologies. This was later confirmed by a News Corp. spokesperson.

The bigger screen may take a little away from the convenience factor, but adding a splash of color can be a huge selling point over the grayscale Kindle. Remember when the first color cell phones hit the scene? Interestingly, Fujitsu already has an e-reader with 260k colors, but that thing costs $1,000. [via mobilemag]

Tony Lewis, who heads an initiative within Verizon Wireless to provide access to non-phone devices, said Wednesday that five companies have approached Verizon about wireless connections for e-readers.

“You’re going to see a lot of e-readers out there,” Lewis said. “The interest level is tremendous.”

Lewis said, refusing to confirm if the company had been in touch

AT&T Inc., the second largest wireless carrier after Verizon Wireless, has also been talking to e-reader manufacturers, said Ralph de la Vega, the company’s head of consumer services. Since AT&T’s network is more similar to ones used overseas, it could support international e-book readers, he noted. The Kindle can download books only in the U.S.

Just like Verizon Wireless, AT&T is looking for ways to expand the uses of its wireless network beyond cell phones to generate additional revenue. [via The Associated Press]

Here is a Readius concept designed by Polymer Vision with Telecom Italia logo on it. Now we can imagine how will look the future Verizon and AT&T reader device.

Readius specifications:

The Foxit eSlick reader, manufactured by the same folks that build the Kindle for Amazon, has finally made its way to market. It looks pretty good, considering that it’s probably the cheapest e-ink reader available.

Release was originally slate for January, but preorders are just finding their way to customers now. Furthermore, anyone whoorders a reader now will probably have to wait a few more weeks to get their hands on one of these $260 no-frills units. [via gizmodo]

Samsung’s announcement that it plans to release an e-book reader called Papyrus means it is at least the seventh company to hop on the digital-book bandwagon.With touchscreen capability and an e-ink screen, the Papyrus will cost just $300, Samsung says, making it even cheaper than the Sony Reader and the Amazon Kindle.

Papyrus appears to be a full fledged PDA, with all sorts of little applications that reminded us of the original Palm Pilots back in the day. The screen is about five inches, with a touch screen display. Writing on the screen and selecting icons have a slight lag, but no worse than most first generation Palm Pilots. It’s a ton faster than the Sony PRS-707 and the iRex Iliad when it comes to touch screen technology.

The real selling point for the Papyrus will be combining the long battery life of e-paper with the power of a PDA. A lot of people are speculating that Samsung will eventually add wireless connectivity to the Papyrus, but so far it uses USB cables for bringing information to and from a computer. [via epapercentral, wired]

PocketBook is a Ukraine based Netronix distributor similar to Bookeen. The reader software they ported is FBReader, and they just announced that they will support an open source project called PocketBook Free. [via mobileread]

Amazon has been building its sale catalog steadily since Kindle’s launch—to more than 245,000 as of today, compared with Sony’s 100,000 or so. Sony now can boast that it offers more than 600,000. With the electronic readers priced in a similar range (Sony’s PRS-505 is about $300 and a price cut today puts its PRS-700 model slightly less then Kindle at $350), including the free books might sound like an advantage to Sony—especially in these frugal days. But the Kindle as a device isn’t a walled garden. [via paidcontent]

Fujitsu are ready to ship their e-reader, and promises 40 hours of continuos use. The unit can be operated by its touchscreen or the assortment of function buttons. Naturally you can do the regular e-book thing, but the Japanese version of the device also includes full-on Windows CE 5.0, which would probably be a bit of a chore to use with the relatively slow screen refresh times of e-ink (1.8 seconds for a single wipe), but undeniably retrofuturistic. FLEPia ships on April 20th in Japan for 99,750 Yen (about $1,010 US).

 [via fujitsu]

Despite not using the power-frugal e-ink, the SV-100B still manages 83hrs of battery life from a single charge.  You can also swap out the battery for a second one, should you really need extended runtime.  While there’s no internal storage, you can fit 10,000 A4 pages on the included 2GB microSD card. [via slashgear]

Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be much innovation going on. It looks like a rebadged version of the Netronix reader. [via engadget]

According to industry insiders, Hearst, which publishes magazines ranging from Cosmopolitan to Esquire and newspapers including the financially imperiled San Francisco Chronicle, has developed a wireless e-reader with a large-format screen suited to the reading and advertising requirements of newspapers and magazines. The device and underlying technology, which other publishers will be allowed to adapt, is likely to debut this year.

So-called e-readers like Kindle and the Sony Reader are hand-held gadgets that use electronic “ink” displayed on a crisp, low-power screen to deliver an experience that approximates reading on paper - without the cost of paper, printing and delivery, which can account for as much as 50% of the cost of putting out a periodical.

Hearst executives declined to provide specifics about the forthcoming e-reader, but Kenneth Bronfin, who heads up the interactive media group for Hearst, told Fortune in an interview for a forthcoming magazine story that the publishing company has a deep expertise in the technology. “I can’t tell you the details of what we are doing, but I can say we are keenly interested in this, and expect these devices will be a big part of our future,” Bronfin told Fortune. [via cnn]

“I was super-eager to try Kindle 2, but after a day spent test-driving it, I’ve decided to send it back in favor of my old reliable K1. A few of my disappointments are related to my poor vision, but most are not.
1.In response to users who found Ki’s page-turning buttons too easy to hit accidentally, Kindle has made the new ones annoyingly resistant to a light touch, and the “previous page” one is located in a spot that makes it almost impossible to turn using your right thumb, which was easy on K2.
2. Similarly, the 5-position “joy stick” is also stiff and doesn’t “flow,” like K8’s sliding cursor.
3, Oddly enough, despite the 16 shades of gray recognized by K2 (which do indeed make pictures much clearer), the contrast of printed words on the screen is MUCH less sharp than on K1–what were they thinking?
4. A personal disappointment: on “Basic Web,” K2 has CNN instead of MSNBC news; I thought the latter had stories that are much more serious and actually related to current news. CNN today led with a diet story,,,,
5. As with Ki, they have not solved the page-numbering problem, which is parhaps my only real complaint about K1.
On the plus side, the text-to-speech feature isn’t bad, and there’s no question that books you order download faster than with K1. But I, for one, don’t need them to arrive in less than 60 seconds! 
If you have the K1 and have ordered the K2, I would definitely recommend test-driving the new one for at least a day before getting rid of the old one. I’ll be really intersted to hear what y’all have to say.”

…………………………………………………………………

“I absolutely agree. I started another thread on this very point (”K2 screen seems blurry…“). I currently have two K2s and one K1 at home and did a side-by-side test and also asked a friend to pick the one that was “easiest to read.” The K1 won hands down.
Based on the other comments in that thread, there seems to be about a 50/50 split between whether existing K1 owners find their new K2s to have a worse screen than their K1s or whether they find the screens comparable. It’s unclear if the “hard to read” quality of the K2 is a defect or if it’s just the way the new screen is.

I’d encourage anyone who has a K1 and a K2 to pull up the same book/page on both and really carefully evaluate whether the K2’s characters are easier or harder to read than the K1 and post their findings either here or in the other thread.”

……………………………………………………

“I agree about the screen. My K1 is much easier on my eyes using Font Size 4. I am having a hard time adjusting to the more “washed out” appearance of the screen on my new K2. Thank God I didn’t sell my K1 on Craigslist. I am going to put it through its paces for a week or so and then make my decision.”

…………………………………………….

“I am a K1 and K2 owner. My three biggest complaints about the K2:
- The K2 screen offers noticeably less contrast than K1. The words on the K2 are not as dark, and the screen background is an odd greenish beige as opposed to the light gray background on the K1. The effect is that the text looks quite washed out even in relatively bright lighting conditions. At first, I wondered whether I simply got a defective screen, but the number of complaints on here suggests it’s something with the design of the screen itself.

- There’s no article list for newspapers anymore. Instead of being able to page through the article titles, I have to flip through each article, one by one, to see what’s available. The section list — which replaced the article list function — is useless for newspapers such as the Wall Street Journal. The article list feature for blogs is improved on Kindle 2; I’m not sure why Amazon didn’t simply provide the same improvement to newspapers.

- Old issues of newspaper subscriptions apparently are automatically deleted after 2 weeks. Frankly, I liked having an archive of old issues and then being able to search the text quickly.

Another minor nit: The K2 seems to have some weird issues with text justification. On seemingly almost every screen, one or two lines are not properly justified, which is distracting.

Aside from these complaints, the K2 is nice — better button placement, improved screen responsiveness, the 5-way joystick — but since this is supposed to be a reading device, it is hard to get excited about those improvements when the screen contrast is so much worse. Very disappointed here.”

[via amazon]

[via ifixit]

Prime View manufactures active matrix e-paper displays using TFT technology for the backplane with an electrophoretic frontplane using E Ink’s technology. The displays are made possible by a combination of MagicMirrorÒReflective Technology and the EPLaRprocess developed by Philips Research, to which PVI now has exclusive license. The company claims that its e-reading devices have an extensive battery life of up to 7,000 page turns per charge, equal to approximately 20-full-length books. In addition, since the products employ a Si gate (poly Si-gate) driver, the devices are more robust and compact. [via epapercentral]

Specifications:

Operation System 
 Linux/WinCE (Optional) 
 Interfaces 
 I/O: USB 2.0 OTG
Slot: SD/MMC/SDIO/SDHC 
 Headphn: 2.5mm Stereo 
 Optional: Wi-Fi/CDMA/EVDO/GSM and more 
 Battery: 1700mhr Li-ion 
 Hardware Spec. 
 400mhz & up/6″, 8″, 9.7″ E Ink®/16 level/128MB 
Ram/512MB FlashFormat Support 
 PDF/TXT/HTML/CHM/RTF/PDB/PRC(Mobipocket)/TTS/JPG/PNG/GIF/BMP/TIFF/MP3 
 Customized formats optional 
 Feature Support 
Text Reflowable/Zoom in/out & pan/Search 
 & annotation/Text to speech “TTS”/Dictionary,Various connectivities

[via onyx-international]

Kindle 2

The eSlick Reader

The txtr reader