Larger Kindle Panacea for Publishers?

UPDATE: It’s (semi) Official–Amazon will be holding a “Press Event” at Pace University on Wednesday, May 6th.  Why choose a University?  eTextbooks perhaps?

UPDATE 2: I have the image wrong–the  one below is the rumored reader from Plastic Logic

UPDATE 3: As you are by now aware, they announced.  And it is PRICEY!

Early morning readers of the newsfeeds may notice that many news sources are writing about the possible pending release, perhaps as early as this week, of a larger (8 1/2″ x 11″?) Amazon Kindle.  This may well be the rumored “student version” but according to the article from which all others are based, the one from the New York Times, this Kindle is seen as the savior of the newspaper industry.

Image from the NYT of the rumored larger Kindle.

Brad Stone in his NYT article writes:

Unlike tiny mobile phones and devices like the Kindle that are made to display text from books, these new gadgets, with screens roughly the size of a standard sheet of paper, could present much of the editorial and advertising content of traditional periodicals in generally the same format as they appear in print. And they might be a way to get readers to pay for those periodicals — something they have been reluctant to do on the Web.Image from the NYT of the rumored larger Kindle.

This article understandably has a few missing tidbits.  Will this new Kindle be the same price as the existing Kindles (over $300?) or will the price of these larger Kindles be subsidized (similar to the cell-phone model) by subscription plans to newspapers and magazines?  In addition, will this larger Kindle also display Kindle books, or will it be only a device for reading periodicals?

These questions are quite interesting, especially since (if the rumor is true) they are releasing a new Kindle only months after the introduction of the Kindle2.

Hopefully we will know–this week!