Students: Textbooks can weigh five-plus pounds and cost 80-plus dollars. So backpack-burdened students are the obvious first customers for a big-screen e-reader that can hold hundreds of textbooks and display their diagrams and charts in full. The Kindle DX isn't the first large-screen e-reader (see the options from iRex) but Amazon's clout gives it an advantage, letting it offer textbooks from many different publishers. Amazon has already announced deals with Pearson, Cengage Learning, and Wiley, who together account for 60 percent of the U.S. textbook market. Although prices for the upcoming digital textbooks haven't been announced, I expect that they'll be lower than the printed version, just as with Amazon's other e-books.

Lauren Aaronson