Tests at Colleges

According to an article in The Wall Street Journal, large-screen Kindles will be distributed on a test basis to students at various universities. Students at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, for example, will receive the new Kindles with several textbooks already installed. The goal is to compare students' Kindle experiences to those of students using ordinary textbooks.

Other universities involved in testing textbooks on Kindle, according to the Journal, include Pace University, Princeton, Reed College, the Darden School at the University of Virginia, and Arizona State. Wednesday's press conference is being held at Pace, in New York City.

Ross Rubin, director of industry analysis for consumer technology at the NPD Group, said that, while the details haven't emerged, a larger-format Kindle for textbooks is "certainly a step forward" for the e-book reader.

He noted that, unlike newspapers, there "is no real electronic ecosystem around textbooks," and therefore no real competition on the Web.

The possibility of widely available electronic textbooks on e-readers, Rubin said, could open up issues with college bookstores. But the "promise of carrying and referencing text from multiple classes in one device," he said, "is very appealing."

Pricing, Competitors, Newspapers

Rubin added that a lot will depend on pricing of the device and the textbooks, and universities will also want to see the textbooks working on competitive devices as well. One of the most publicized of expected competitors is an 8.5-by-11-inch e-reader coming this summer from Mountain View, Calif.-based Plastic Logic, in a trial with the Detroit Free Press and Detroit News.

In addition to textbooks, the new larger-screen Kindle is also expected to make a more concerted effort to attract newspaper and magazine readers. According to news reports, New York Times Chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and executives from Time magazine will attend Wednesday's press event.

The larger-format e-readers could conceivably have an impact on the American newspaper industry, which is in a dire crisis because of declining advertising revenue and readers moving to the Internet for news.

Newspaper and magazine subscriptions are already sold through the existing Kindle models, but those earlier devices were optimized for book reading, not larger newspapers and magazines. Additionally, newspaper publishers have complained about Amazon's business model, where the online retail giant keeps 70 percent of a newspaper or magazine subscription and doesn't allow publications to carry ads.