Rumours are flying that Amazon is about to unveil a new Kindle at an event scheduled for May 6th. The event will take place in New York at Pace University but the Amazon press invitation omits to mention what will be announced. The timing of the event, earlier reports from The New York Times and the fact that Arthur Sulzberger, publisher of said newspaper, is expected to join Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos at the event certainly suggest that Amazon’s latest Kindle device has well and truly been outed.
The new Kindle will come with a larger screen, making it ideal to display content such as newspapers, magazines and textbooks. According to The New York Times which broke the story, the newspaper and magazine industry has high expectations for the device as it would help it to accelerate a move towards digital media in a bid to cut the costs of printing and distributing publications.
Amazon is already offering over 50 newspaper and magazine subscriptions to current Kindle users. Amazon does not reveal subscription numbers but The Wall Street Journal indicated that it had about 15,000 subscribers and Fortune has about 5,000. Definitely not numbers that could save an ailing industry.