Amazon's new Kindle DX will begin shipping to consumers a bit earlier than expected, on June 10, for the steep price of $489. As previously reported, the follow-up to February's release of the Kindle 2 boasts a larger screen and more memory than its predecessors, and it's designed to better display newspapers and textbooks. Among the new features are the ability to shift from portrait to landscape mode and long-overdue support for PDF documents.
Like its predecessor, the DX model connects via 3G to Amazon's 3G-based Whispernet for wireless book shopping, with more than 290,000 titles to chose from. Interestingly enough, Google also announced today it plans to sell e-books directly by the end of 2009, with people being able to read their contents on any device with internet access --- including mobile phones --- and not just dedicated e-readers.
Competition appears to be growing increasingly fierce in the hardware side of things as well. E Ink, the company that provides the electronic paper displays used in Amazon's Kindle and Sony's Reader, reported that it has reached an agreement to be acquired by Taiwan's Prime View International for $215 million. Meanwhile, Pixel Qi has begun demonstrating its three-in-one display technology, which features and e-paper mode and will be available in commercial products later this year.