CG: “Specs and info leaked about the now official Kindle over the last week and they seemed pretty much dead on. It comes packing with the larger screen, auto-rotating screen, and finally supports PDF files fully with a native PDF reader. This larger Kindle also ups the storage capacity from 1,500 books on the Kindle 2 to 3,500 on the Kindle DX thanks to 3.3GB of on board memory.”

pC: “Bezos: ‘Even with electronic paper, you need a big display. Ladies and gentleman, we’ve decided to introduce Kindle DX, it’s 2 1/2 times the Kindle 2’s display. You never have to pan, zoom, or scroll. You just read the documents.‘”

NYT: “Amazon said it had reached agreements with three major textbook publishers, Pearson, Cengage Learning and Wiley Higher Education, to make their books available in the Kindle store. The company also said that six colleges and universities – Pace, Arizona State University, Case Western Reserve University, Princeton University, Reed College and the University of Virginia – would begin testing the device later this year with students.”

VB: “I’m spending that kind of money just so I can see The New York Times on a big screen. And that doesn’t even get into the question of whether readers really need the bigger screen – that makes sense if you’re trying to parse (and make electronic notes on) a textbook full of complicated diagrams, but I’m not sure readers who have gotten used to finding their news on websites and RSS feeds care about the size.”

CG: “The gist seems to be that, um, $500 to read New Yorker articles about race horses you’ve never heard of or 8 million words on why waterboarding is or is not torture may be a bit too much for most people.”

RWW: “Judging from what we have seen so far, we don’t think that the Kindle DX will be a major game-changer in the eTextbook market or for the newspaper business. Besides the bigger screen, there is nothing really new in the Kindle DX, though having a native PDF reader will surely be useful to a lot of users.”

Mashable: “Meanwhile, the plan to digitize textbooks is also interesting. In addition to universities – which include Princeton, UVA, Case Western, Arizona State, and Reed College – there appears to be buy-in from the textbook manufacturers to offer books in the Kindle store. Although I’m a few years removed from college, I can say that digitizing textbooks is a game changer. Buying dozens of new textbooks each semester was an enormous gripe of mine – not just because of the cost, but because of how wasteful it is. The Kindle has the potential to change this. – The Kindle is still probably a few years away from realizing its potential to change these two businesses. The cost needs to come down (the DX retails for $489) and the content publishers need to buy-in fully. But it’s certainly a device that has a chance to revolutionize (and perhaps save) a couple of antiquated businesses. And make Amazon a lot of money in the process.”