Amazon.com poised to launch Kindle 3 this week?

Amazon.com has called a mysterious press conference for Wednesday at Pace University in New York. The announcement follows a report in the New York Times that Amazon could announce its long-rumored Kindle 3, tailored for reading newspapers and magazines, as early as this week. The company has been ramping up its Kindle strategy, last week buying the maker of Stanza, a popular electronic book application for the iPhone.

The last time Amazon called a mysterious press conference in New York, it was to unveil Kindle 2, in February. The Times reports that some news organizations, including the Times itself, "are expected to be involved in the introduction of the device." In another sign of  the New York Times' central place in the announcement, Pace University sits on the site of the NYT's 19th-century headquarters. (Interesting side note: Amazon and the NYT apparently flirted with a potentially lucrative partnership in the 1990s, linking book reviews to Amazon, which never took off).

Amazon just started shipping its second-generation Kindle in February, and quickly followed that up with a Kindle application for the iPhone. Amazon last week acquired Lexcycle, maker of the popular iPhone e-book app Stanza.

Amazon isn't alone in building a reading device geared toward periodicals. Both the Times and the Wall Street Journal today report on efforts by various newspaper and magazine publishers to develop their own larger-screen electronic reading devices. The Journal reports that Hearst, publisher of the Seattlepi.com as well as the San Francisco Chronicle and Cosmoplitan, is working with something called FirstPaper LLC to "create a software platform that will support digital downloads of newspapers and magazines."

Other companies known or rumored to be working on larger screen e-readers are News Corp., which owns the Wall Street Journal; Silicon Valley startup Plastic Logic, which is teaming with various newspaper publishers; and Apple.

Why all the independent efforts, when many of these publishers already sell newspapers and magazines through the Kindle store? Amazon's platform has some drawbacks, according to the Journal:

Critics gripe that Kindles don't allow for displaying ads and are poor substitutes for the look and feel of thumbing through pages. Magazine and newspaper executives also stew that Amazon won't let them set subscription prices for their own publications. Publishers keep less than half of the revenue from sales of their subscriptions on the Kindle, according to publishers.

Looks like Amazon is trying to get out in front of these rivals before they can get any traction.

Does Amazon see potential for other markets with a larger-screen Kindle? There's been frequent speculation that Amazon will target college students -- promoting the Kindle as a replacement for heavy and extensive textbooks. The location of Wednesday's press conference, at a university, could indicate a textbook strategy as well.

Update: The Wall Street Journal reports that Amazon has "worked out a deal with several textbook publishers to make their materials available for the device" and that 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." Pace University, Princeton University, Reed College, Darden School at the University of Virginia, and Arizona State University are also involved in the project, according to the Journal.

The report says Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos will share the stage with New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger at the Wednesday event.

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