Today Amazon launched the Kindle DX. The DX is a widescreen version of the Kindle and was designed to display periodicals and textbooks. At $489 USD it is more expensive that it’s already pricey siblings but that works in the textbook market, where this kind of money is practically a drop in the bucket in terms of what students have to pay for textbooks.

Amazon has struck deals with Pearson, Wiley, and Cengage - the top three textbook publishers - to provide content for the DX. These publishers make up 60 percent of the textbook market and include many major imprints.  Amazon will also be making the device available to students when it launches trial programs with at least five universities (Arizona State University, Case Western Reserve University, Princeton University, Reed College, and Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia) this fall.

In terms of specificiations, the DX has a screen that is 2.5 times the size of the previous Kindles. It also features an accelerometer, which is a fancy way of saying the DX will auto-rotate the display mode between portrait and landscape when the user flips the device around. Anyone who has a Blackberry Storm or an iPhone knows how useful this feature is. The DX also supports PDF files, something that has been a big issue for current Kindle owners and would have likely been a deal breaker for the textbook market.

When you add in all the other features normally found on the Kindle, it seems like the DX has finally found the sweetspot for eBook readers - students:

• Bookmarks and Annotations - perfect for taking notes in class
• Built-in Dictionary With Instant Lookup - need I say more?
• Wireless Access to Wikipedia - a favored research starting point for many students
• Read-to-me - while less than perfect, this feature might make it more likely for students to review the material

Other experimental features - such as a basic web browser and an MP3 / Podcast player - also seemed designed with this target market in mind. Now that Amazon has purchased Lexcycle, the company behind the eBook application for the iPhone, students also have the ability to synchronize Kindle books using Amazon’s Whispersync technology.

In short the Kindle finally makes sense.