Another day, another Kindle press conference. Here I am again at a New York launch event for a new Amazon device, only three months after the arrival of the Kindle 2.

This time, Jeff Bezos of Amazon has just enthused about the Kindle DX, which sounds like a small car but is in fact a large screen version of the Kindle electronic paper reading device.

I am not sure whether it is really an improvement.

One good thing is that it has a 9.7 inch display, which makes it easier to read complex documents with photos and graphics embedded - particularly PDFs. PDFs (but not Word documents) can be loaded on directly through a port, rather than having to be e-mailed through Amazon.

That makes it better suited for textbooks and Mr Bezos announced a partnership with three big educational publishers, including Pearson, which owns the Financial Times. The device is going to be tested out by a group of US universities, including Princeton, this autumn.

In theory, it also makes it better for displaying newspapers and magazines. Arthur Sulzberger, chairman of the New York Times Company, was on hand to announce a partnership with Amazon.

But all of this comes at a cost, both financially and physically.

The device is going to retail at $489 when it arrives this summer, which strikes me as pretty expensive for the average college student, even if it would save lugging around textbooks.

It is also heavier than the smaller Kindle 2, at 19 ounces in weight compared with 10 ounces. That takes a toll if you are holding it for prolonged periods.

One market I could see it appealing to is investors and analysts, as a medium for reading complex financial reports. It was notable that the first slide Mr Bezos displayed on stage was of a Merrill Lynch research report on technology.

As to newspaper readers adopting it in droves, I am less sure. Newspaper owners are keen on large-screen electronic paper devices because they more closely mimic the physical version of the paper. But I wonder whether the Kindle DX will deliver what they want.

I reflected the other day on whether the job of the golf caddie could be split into two separate tasks. In the same vein, I was intrigued to read this morning about how James Patterson, the best-selling author, has a factory of writers who pump out fiction under his name.

This seems similar to Damien Hirst, the British artist who copied Andy Warhol’s notion of the art factory and employs a team of assistants to manufacture works of art under his name.

This article on Peter de Jonge, a Patterson collaborator who has now written a novel under his own name, has some details of Mr Patterson’s working methods:

The instructions he gives his co-authors are very detailed, he explained, and then he extensively reworks their drafts. “The outlines I do are really, really powerful,” he said. “They’re 60 pages sometimes, and they’re pretty good to read just on their own. They’re like little high-adrenaline bullet trains, with every chapter built around a nugget.”

I suppose this counts as authorship, with other writers fillling in the blanks in the outlines and Mr Patterson revising and polishing the final version.

Mr de Jonge also has a tip for writers, gleaned from his work with Mr Patterson:

“What I learned from him is that you can’t be self-indulgent. Even the most literary book has to be a page turner. You’re not accomplishing anything by writing something that’s hard to read.”

Charles Dickens, who in his old-fashioned way wrote all his own books, might have agreed with that. It seems to work, to judge by Mr Patterson’s prodigious sales.

There are no prizes for guessing what Amazon plans to announce this week at a press conference to which I received an invitation by email this morning. It seems highly likely to be a larger-sized Kindle designed for reading newspapers and magazines.

As the New York Times reports this morning:

It is Amazon, maker of the Kindle, that appears to be first in line to try throwing an electronic life preserver to old-media companies. As early as this week, according to people briefed on the online retailer’s plans, Amazon will introduce a larger version of its Kindle wireless device tailored for displaying newspapers, magazines and perhaps textbooks.

Those “people briefed on its plans” may not be far from Times Square, since the NYT itself is likely to be front and centre at the announcement, according to Peter Kafka.

The various pieces in the papers this morning naturally focus on whether the Kindle or other devices like it, which will appear in the next few months, will be the saviours of newspapers.

I don’t know, although I do read my morning papers on my Kindle these days and find it useful for getting through a lot of material rapidly, once one gets used to the navigation.

So I tend to think that e-readers - and perhaps tablet devices of the kind that Apple is said to be working on - have potential. I cannot express it better than Steven Johnson in this recent piece.

Having said that, there is clearly an element of wishful thinking in newspapers seeking to replicate the existing print experience electronically. It would be comforting to think that all readers will transfer to electronic versions of paper (and pay for them) but it is, I suspect, too much to hope.

David Carr’s column this morning recommending that newspapers band together to stop giving away their content on the web will no doubt raise the hackles of Jeff Jarvis, Felix Salmon and those who are viscerally opposed to papers charging online readers.

Be that as it may, I thought the most intriguing point he made was about advertising markets, which sell ad space on behalf of internet publishers, but have been delivering low yields because of the excess of supply over demand:

No more commoditised ads. Ad markets and remnant sales have been a lose-lose proposition, ginning up more and more ads for less and less revenue, turning a grim dollars-into-dimes model into a hopeless dimes-into-pennies proposition. Newspapers once thrived by selling scarce ad positions. The downside is turning down ads, and who can afford that right now?

I wonder if we are seeing a turning point for ad networks and ad exchanges, which once looked like being  saviours for online publishers but currently seem to be, at best, a mixed blessing.

I wrote a column last year about ad exchanges, prompted by Microsoft’s bid for Yahoo, which included this passage:

This is the acquisition’s hidden promise and the motive behind Google’s planned $3bn purchase of the online advertising group DoubleClick and Microsoft’s $6bn acquisition of aQuantive. “If it works, and that is a big ‘if’, it is the core of the deal,” says David Hallerman, a senior analyst at the research group eMarketer.

The idea is that Google and Microsoft-Yahoo could use technology to place ads more cheaply and efficiently. Instead of media buyers negotiating individually with publishers for space on internet sites, the process would be automated. Ads would be bought and sold like shares on stock exchanges.

It sounds like a fine idea and it will be if it turns out to be correct. The problem is that it is unproven and there are reasons why it may not pan out. Internet publishers and brand advertisers such as Unilever, IBM and Procter & Gamble could easily end up shunning the machine.

Carr is now advocated precisely this - that publishers shun intermediaries and sell their own ads directly, as they do in the offline world.

Update: Razorfish, the online consultancy, seems to be getting on this bandwagon in its just-published  Digital Outlook report. It says (on page 14 in the PDF version):

The traditional ad network world will contract as competition for declining ad dollars increases. There are simply too many broad networks competing for the same inventory and not telling a new story. Large publishers (eg the Fox Audience Networkand Turner Entertainment) will continue to take back control of their inventory and monetise it themselves, or they will work with fewer ad networks to ensure quality and maximise value.

Amazon has just published its anticipated iPhone application for the Kindle, allowing you to read your Kindle e-books (although not your newspapers, magazines or blogs) on an iPhone or iPod Touch.

This gives me a chance to compare the Kindle to the iPhone (actually an iPod in my case) as a reading device. I downloaded the applicaton this morning (very easily, and it is free) and took a look.

My conclusion is that I don’t think I will be doing much book reading on my iPod. The Kindle interface is quite easy to use (one flicks between pages using the touch screen) and it is quite nice to have another copy of the book to hand but a small backlist screen is not a good medium for long-form reading.

One thing it strikes me as being useful for is having an easy way to find and display passages in - or quotes from - books that I am reading on my Kindle.

Any electronic bookmarks you make on the Kindle are automatically transferred to the version stored on your Apple device. This means you can handily refer to passages you have already picked out.

So it is nice to have - and perhaps useful if the Kindle is not to hand - but I share Amazon’s view that it is an add-on rather than a substitute. Indeed, the company has clearly designed it that way.

That said, some people are clearly using their iPhones to read books.

I take it that Howard Stringer and Ryoji Chubachi will not be taking any more baths together.

Sir Howard’s decision to shift Mr Chubachi aside from being his second-in-command at Sony and head of the company’s powerful electronics division, and take the post himself (in addition to being chairman and chief executive) reminded me of a piece in Fortune in 2006.

It started:

One day last July, two naked men lowered themselves into a hot spring in Hakone, a Japanese tourist town known for its beautiful lake and views of Mount Fuji. One was a pallid, curly-haired 63- year-old Welsh-born American citizen who carries a few extra kilos on his 6-foot-3 frame. The other was a slight, balding, dark-haired 58-year-old Japanese engineer.

The two men had scarcely met, but they needed to get to know each other in a hurry, so they had arranged a weekend in the country, enjoying a walk in the woods, a boat ride, and a piano concert. A big job awaited them - the task of overhauling Sony, the troubled electronics giant that had once symbolized the rise of postwar Japan.

Since then, the unlikely duo of Sir Howard Stringer and Dr Ryoji Chubachi has rattled Sony to its foundations - cutting costs, selling assets, upending old ways.

It now seems that Sir Howard did not think his hot springs companion was rattling Sony sufficiently. His decision not to concede defeat to the entrenched powers and impenetrable corporate culture of Sony in Japan, but to try to seize control personally, is bold. For Sony’s sake, I hope it works.

It is, however, a reminder that being given the job title “chief executive” does not guarantee that everyone falls into line with what you say - or even listens, if they can help it.

The latest Fortune has an interesting piece looking back at the tenure of Lee Scott, who has just stepped down at chief executive of Wal-Mart. It argues that one of Mr Scott’s biggest achievements was to assert control over a company that was bitterly divided.

As Scott rose through the ranks, he developed a reputation for being reserved, strategic, and sarcastic . . . His main rival, Thomas Coughlin, was ebullient and tactical . . . Management was soon split between Scott and Coughlin, who had been named president of Wal-Mart’s domestic stores. There were “friends of Tom’s,” called FOTs, and “friends of Lee’s,” or FOLs.

Mr Coughlin eventually stepped down amid in-fighting and pleaded guilty to wire fraud and tax evasion after being accused by the company of having filed false expense claims. That gave Mr Scott the latitude to eject others associated with Mr Coughlin.

Similarly, Sony’s poor financial results have given Sir Howard an opening to assert a degree of control over Sony that he hitherto had in theory but not in practice. That may account for his mood on Friday, as the FT reported:

“This is the most fun I’ve had in six months,” said an ebullient Sir Howard, as he announced the management changes.

It turns out that the main flaw I identified in reading newspapers on my Kindle has already been solved - I just did not realise it.

My complaint in the post below was:

One problem is there are only two layers of navigation. There is a top level summary of the various sections of the paper such as editorials, international news, company news etc, with the number of articles in each section listed alongside.

When you click down one level, you get all the articles in that section one after another. So if you want to know what the 25th article is about, you have to click the “next article” button 25 times.

I felt an acute need for a second level of navigation, with a list of articles in each section by headlines, which would allow you to browse through them.

Acute need fulfilled. I found out accidentally today that, when you click on the number of articles listed for any section, that takes you into a second level of navigation listing all the articles in the section by a headline and a couple of lines of text.

So there are three levels of navigation in all, not two. Unless there is a fourth that is still hiding from me, that is.

In my defence, it is not easy to discover this. It feels like a clue you have to crack in a video game by trial and error before you get to the next level of the game.

Having done so, however, I went back to the user guide supplied with the Kindle, which I had given up reading after a few pages. It was duly, although briefly, explained there.

But who reads instruction manuals, anyway?

Having used my Kindle 2 for a couple of days, I can offer some thoughts on it. There are lots of reviews of the device around the place so I will focus on one aspect that is close to home - how it functions as an e-reader for newspapers.

This is not intended as the Kindle’s main use, which is to read electronic versions of books. However, you can subscribe to various papers and magazines, including the FT, and they are wirelessly delivered every morning. In the FT’s case, since the Kindle is currently a US-only device, it is the US edition.

I took out two-week trial subscriptions to the FT, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. Incidentally, the ranking of the most popular subscriptions on Kindle is as follows:

1. New York Times

2. Wall Street Journal

3. USA Today

4. Financial Times

5. Washington Post

6. International Herald Tribune

7. Los Angeles Times

8. Chicago Tribune

9. Politico

10. Investor’s Business Daily

I suppose this indicates, not surprisingly, that there is a bias in Kindle subscriptions towards work use, which pushes up the popularity of the FT and Investor’s Business Daily.

Overall, I find reading papers on the Kindle quite convenient in various ways but I think that both Amazon and the newspapers themselves have some more work to do before it becomes an adequate substitute for the paper and online versions.

I will rank the good things first:

1. Convenience.

The paper gets delivered to you wherever you are, rather than to your house. Most of the time this does not make much difference but it can be very convenient if you are on a trip (providing it is within the US, since the wireless coverage does not extend internationally).

Apart from this, the Kindle is small and easily handled when you are on the move. That means, for example, that you can read it quite easily while on an exercise machine at a gym (where I was this morning). That is easier that struggling to turn and fold a broadsheet paper while working out.

It is also useful if you are standing up on a New York subway car (as I was yesterday). Again, you can flick through articles easily without wrestling with papers.

2. Ease of reading

The Kindle is really quite a good device to read things on. The electronic paper display, once you get used to it, is much more restful on the eyes than a backlit computer or BlackBerry screen. I found that I was able to concentrate on reading some articles better on a Kindle than on newsprint.

3. Clippings

Marking an article you want to return to in a paper involves scrawling on it with a pen and keeping that copy with you. The Kindle has various ways of highlighting and annotating text. The easiest and simplest is just adding it to your clippings and looking them up later.

4. Searching.

You can search the paper electronically, looking for company names or other things. That can work better, and is more flexible, than relying on the editors’ lists of stories.

5. Archiving and storage

The Kindle files away back copies of the papers you read for several days before deleting them from the device.

And here are the bad things, or things that could be improved:

1. Lack of timeliness.

To state the obvious, the Kindle version is like the paper version in being delivered to you only once a day. It lacks the constant updating of news organisations’ internet sites. I suppose it could be improved by having, for example, end-of-day updates.

2. Navigation.

This is the big one. No technology that I know of rivals paper for ease of navigation. You can look through headlines before deciding to read a selection of articles efficiently and quickly. The Kindle 2 has a better navigation system than the first Kindle but is still a work in progress.

One problem is there are only two layers of navigation. There is a top level summary of the various sections of the paper such as editorials, international news, company news etc, with the number of articles in each section listed alongside.

When you click down one level, you get all the articles in that section one after another. So if you want to know what the 25th article is about, you have to click the “next article” button 25 times.

I felt an acute need for a second level of navigation, with a list of articles in each section by headlines, which would allow you to browse through them. Incidentally, one veteran Kindle user that I spoke to this week said that was his main criticism of the Kindle as a substitute for papers.

This is obviously fixable. However, it seems to require Kindle itself to make changes since all of the three papers I tried out suffered from the same problem, to varying extents. The two-level navigation, which is fine for books, seems to be a feature of the device.

3. Mysteriousness.

When you have finished a paper, you know it because you have rustled your way through it, discarding sections. Since the Kindle remains the same whether you have read one or many articles from a paper, you do not have a sense instinctively of whether you have got through the paper or not.

There is a display on the home screen that give you some sense (with a series of dots) of how far you are through a book or a magazine. But it does not seem to work for papers. So you constantly have a slightly guilty sense that you have not really done the work yet.

Or perhaps that is just me.