Jumbo Kindle expected this week

With the Kindle 2 still flying off the e-shelves, Amazon appears ready to take advantage of that momentum by launching a long-anticipated large-screen version of the device, allegedly optimized for reading newspapers and magazines. (The photo to the right isn't the Kindle XXL; it's actually a similar device from a company called Plastic Logic, which the company hopes to be ready for sale within the next year.)

Amazon has not pre-announced the device, but it is holding a press conference on Wednesday morning in New York, the identical modus operandi as when it launched the prior two versions of the Kindle. Unless Amazon is getting into the cell phone or the netbook business, all signs point to another Kindle revision, even though the last version of the device launched only three months ago.

Many are already commenting that a big Kindle would be a savior for the daily/weekly media business -- both newspapers and magazines are almost universally on the ropes these days -- as a larger screen would give readers a more familiar experience to scanning the stories in a newspaper, since you could fit more than one on a page and not have to flip through, screen by screen, until you find something you want to read. But a few critics are noting that that may not be the case: As Peter Kafka says in the AllThingsD article linked above, "It doesn’t matter how you deliver the information, if you can’t afford to generate it in the first place. And the industry’s more sober executives understand that."

ZDNet's Larry Dignan adds that he thinks the Kindle 3 will not be designed primarily as a device for newspapers and magazines to take advantage of but as a textbook-viewing device. Margins on textbooks are ridiculously high: The average book costs $57 when purchased new. Amazon already horns in on some of that money but would love to shift much more of it to its electronic format; however the current Kindle's small screen and lack of features like highlighting make it a less-than-ideal textbook platform. A larger Kindle (especially if it has a touchscreen one can use for underlining passages) would go a long way toward solving that problem. We'll see in 48 hours.

Oh, and if you need more evidence of Amazon's textbook ambitions, Dignan also points to the obvious: Amazon's press conference on Wednesday is being held at Pace University, not in the newsroom of the New York Times.