Amazon’s launch of its first dedicated e-reader for newspapers and magazines points to a future when digital and analogue publishing begins to merge.

Nearly double the size of the book giant’s existing e-reader, Amazon’s wireless Kindle DX has adopted a tabloid-like format for ease of reading newspapers and magazines such as The New York Times and the Washington Post which have announced they will launch pilots editions on Kindle DX this summer.

Although others, most notably the Japanese and the Dutch, have trials underway that publish tabloid-size digital editions for other handheld e-reader devices, Amazon with its mighty marketing clout represents the first mainstream commercial stab at the market.

Increased graphics resolution and the larger size of the tablet-like, the $489 Kindle DX is also a departure from previous e-readers on the market, although Japan’s Fujitsu has a similar sized colour reader on the market for twice the price.

“Cookbooks, computer books, and textbooks - anything highly formatted -shine on the Kindle DX,” claims Jeff Bezos, Amazon.com Founder and CEO underlining the new Kindle’s purported better handling of detail and graphics.

Amazon already has a hit on its hands with the Kindle 2. The same heft as a paperback, weighing about eight ounces, such e-ink readers are basically handheld screens on which you can read words page by page reasonably comfortably.

Amazon says it has already sold more than 500,000 of its $359 Kindle e-readers, which buyers use mostly as a portable library downloading print media via a wireless connection.

The new Kindle DX, like other popular e-readers such as the Sony reader, employs “e-ink” technology that far enhances the reading of digitized print.
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