Amazon launches larger-screen Kindle for $489

Amazon.com introduced a larger, Kindle electronic reader on Wednesday designed for students and newspaper readers, but a $489 price tag could make it too expensive for many consumers. The Kindle DX, which has a 9.7 inch black-and-white display, is designed to be a more friendly vehicle for textbooks and newspapers, which often need a larger space to display their content effectively. The DX has about 2.5 times the surface area of the normal Kindle and costs $130 more. The DX also allows people to read personal documents, and is touted as a way for businesspeople and others to avoid having to carry around an assortment of loose papers. Besides making highly formatted pages easier to read, the DX has more memory, 3.3 gigabytes, which can hold up to 3,500 books versus the normal Kindle's 1,500. Amazon is hoping that newspaper publishers find the Kindle DX a better way to show off their daily editions.