

Amazon is almost certain to announce a large-screen Kindle on Wednesday.

In the world of e-book readers, that's huge. But if Apple fulfills expectations and releases a tablet-style computer later this year, it's going to render the Kindle – no matter what screen size – almost instantly moot.

Amazon's Kindle is far and away the most popular e-book reader; Amazon probably sold half a million last year and may sell a million Kindle 2's this year. Yet the Kindle's 6-inch screen, while impressively readable and crisp, is only slightly larger than a 3" x 5" index card. That's why many magazine and newspaper publishers are excited about the prospect of a larger Kindle — let's call it the "Kindle XL." Even if it's not as large as Plastic Logic's promised 8.5" x 11" screen (due in early 2010), a larger screen would provide lots more room to display the day's news, attractively laid-out feature stories, and, of course, advertisements.

Textbook publishers — who may be Amazon's true target market, if the speculations of our own Charlie Sorrel as well as Om Malik are correct — may have even more to be happy about. The $9.8 billion textbook market is a prime example of the slowness, stupidity and waste of paper publishing. Plus, students would welcome the chance to ditch backbreaking tonnage and carry a thin, lightweight e-book reader instead. Amortized over the four or five years of a typical college education, even a $500 or $600 reader would be a reasonable expense. UPDATE 3:30pm Pacific: According to the Wall Street Journal, six universities will be offering their students e-textbooks on the large-screen Kindle.

But all this pales in comparison with what an Apple tablet could do. Rumors earlier this year suggested that Apple is working on a larger version of the iPhone with a 9 or 10-inch touchscreen, rather than a tablet-style MacBook. More recently, BusinessWeek cited anonymous sources suggesting that Apple and Verizon would soon release an iPhone-like "media pad" with a larger screen.

Imagine that the "media pad" includes a screen two to four times the size of the iPhone's 3.5-inch (2" x 3") screen, Wi-Fi connectivity, the ability to run software from the App Store and a full web browser.

The usefulness of a device like that would instantly trump that of any e-book reader, even if the battery life is poor and the screen less readable than an e-ink screen. That's because a simple, easy-to-use tablet would be able to do anything the e-book reader could (display the text of books using an app like Stanza, which Amazon recently acquired) plus it would have access to 40,000 apps and billions of web pages. Its screen would be able to display color, and it would undoubtedly let you access e-mail, IM and other apps that people want.

By contrast, e-book readers are good at basically one thing: Storing and displaying monochrome text and simple graphics. While the Kindle 2 has a web browser, it's all but useless for even the most basic web activities.

Make no mistake: There are many more people who would be interested in a general-purpose tablet than in an e-book reader. Sure, the majority of them would probably use it to download bikini photos of Evangeline Lilly while watching Lost on the big screen instead of re-reading Proust.

But if the PC and smartphone industries are any guide, people will opt for a well-designed multipurpose device over a special-purpose gadget every time, even if the latter does a few things much better. Already, there are more people reading e-books on the iPhone using Stanza alone (more than one million) than on the Kindle.

We don't know whether Apple will release a tablet or not. But if it does, its sales will make the Kindle's million units look like a rounding error.

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Illustration of an imaginary iPhone tablet: Flickr/vernhart