New Kindle Rumor RoundUp

It’s virtually unanimous that the new Kindle e-book reader will have a larger screen and be designed to appeal to periodical and academic textbook publishers…

WSJ Online:

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. Amazon has worked out a deal with several textbook publishers to make their materials available for the device, Mr. Gonick added. The new device will also feature a more fully functional Web browser, he said.

Om Malik’s interest was piqued by the buzz about e-paper:

I discovered that earlier this month, a group of researchers at the University of Cincinnati in Ohio came up with a new technology that allows them to re-create the brightness and color capabilities of paper-based media. This makes it possible to mimic the experience of glossy magazines such as Vogue and InStyle.

In other words, they’re bringing us much closer to the real thing. The researchers at UC’s Novel Device Laboratories have developed an electrofluidic display technology that uses pigments and ambient light. The technology is being commercialized by a handful of startups including Gamma Dynamics and Polymer Vision. Sun Chemical, a color and pigment maker, is also part of the commercialization efforts.

Read on for how the technology works. The New York Times Co. and Time Warner’s Time Inc. magazine division may have been invited to tomorrow’s scheduled press conference, but Om says the Kindle can’t save newspapers:

The eagerness with which people are assuming that Kindle HD will be a savior for the media business is striking. Comparisons are being made to the iPod, which came at a desperate time for the music industry. But while after eight years, the iPod is a megabillion-dollar business, the music industry is still in the toilet, with digital sales failing to grow fast enough to cover the drop in sales of physical CDs. The most recent reminder of that for me came last week, when I went to the Apple store to pick up an accessory and saw that the Virgin Megastore across the street in San Francisco had closed.

Somebody tell it to the Times:

Now the recession-ravaged newspaper and magazine industries are hoping for their own knight in shining digital armor, in the form of portable reading devices with big screens… these new gadgets, with screens roughly the size of a standard sheet of paper, could present much of the editorial and advertising content of traditional periodicals in generally the same format as they appear in print. And they might be a way to get readers to pay for those periodicals — something they have been reluctant to do on the Web.

Scott Heekin-Canedy, president and general manager of The New York Times, is more cautiously optimistic:

I believe that print will be around for years to come. Yet as the distribution formats proliferate and there are more choices, like Kindle, Sony Reader, IPhone and other devices soon to enter the market, the proportions of our readership are likely to shift across these platform choices. See the cover story in today’s Business Day in print, or online here.

What might be the future format? I think the answer is that it will be your choice. We expect to provide formats to support these devices if there is customer demand.

More about the textbook prospects for the new device from Larry Dignan at ZDNet:

The data, courtesy of the NACS Foundation [link], illustrates Amazon’s opportunity. More than 32 cents of your textbook dollar goes to paper, printing and edit costs. Toss in freight and a third of your textbook dollar goes to stuff that can be eradicated with a Kindle.

Meanwhile, the textbook margins are pretty good. All Amazon has to do is blow up the textbook market and capture some of those profits.

Responding to the comments, Dignan runs some numbers:

Say you buy a textbook for $100. Our resident student Zack Whittaker reckons he’d get maybe $50 at best when he sells the book back. So here’s the math:

• You buy text book for $100;
• You’re out of $100 for a semester;
• You sell the textbook back for $50;
• You’re out of $50 total, but your cash flow was gone for a semester. That money could have been spent on better things (beer?).

Now what if Amazon charges you $35 for a textbook. Your upfront cost is $35, there are no lines for returning the book and you keep it. Even without a used book market you come out ahead.

Kenneth C. Green, writing in Inside Higher Ed last week, dug through the hundreds of new regulations in the Higher Education Opportunity Act (HEOA) passed by Congress in August 2008. There he found…

…new mandates that require colleges — and, more specifically, college owned or operated bookstores — to publish the ISBN numbers and retail prices for textbooks, other trade titles, and related course materials that faculty recommend and students buy for classes. The new HEOA mandates reflect, in part, Congressional concern, echoed in many state legislatures in recent years, about the rising cost of textbooks. The ISBN mandate becomes operational in July 2010.

He traces the impact of the Internet on how and where college students buy textbooks and finds that the transparency the law requires will be good for Internet book sellers. And that it will be a catalyst for new services that target college students, colleges and universities.

How convenient for the Kindle!

BTW, the note at the end of Inside Higher Ed’s blurb today on the textbook-friendly kindle points out that “[they] and Amazon have struck an agreement for Inside Higher Ed to be available through the Kindle.”

The Chronicle’s Wired Campus says a previous effort to use e-book readers in the classroom bombed, and it’s not clear how Amazon will do any better:

In an experiment last year at Northwest Missouri State University with another e-book device, made by Sony, students and professors quickly asked for their printed books back. Students were excited by the devices at first, but they became frustrated by how difficult it was to quickly flip through the digital textbooks or make annotations.

In the end, the university’s officials, who remain excited about the promise of e-textbooks, decided to continue their pilot program using laptops instead of dedicated e-book devices. In surveys, students have shown much greater satisfaction reading e-books on their computers than they did on the Sony Reader. Interactivity — the ability to annotate and take notes — were the main factors cited by students, rather than the size of the devices.

If you want to see what all the hubbub is about, last night Endgadget posted some leaked photos of the new e-reader.