The Kindle DX, announced last month, goes on sale this week. The Wall Street Journal’s gadget maven, Walter Mossberg writes about road testing the device in today’s WSJ. His verdict is in the headline; “The Latest Kindle: Bigger, Not Better, Than Its Sibling”

For standard books, Mossberg suggests sticking with the “smaller, more comfortable Kindle.” But, as he points out, the new Kindle is meant for other types of reading. It is “targeted at three markets: textbooks, newspapers and other periodicals, and business documents in either Microsoft’s Word format or Adobe’s PDF format.”

He found the result for business documents mixed and for newspapers, “annoying.” He wasn’t able to test college textbooks on the device, but thinks this may be the “killer app” for the DX, since “Many already are so expensive and heavy they could make the weight and price of the Kindle DX seem trivial in comparison.”

Meanwhile, Library Journal reports on a pilot test of Kindles for ILL purposes at Brigham Young University. Again, as LJ reported in an earlier story, Amazon’s responses to requests for permission to lend the device are conflicting.

CBS Sunday Morning did a story on the popularity of cell phone novels in Japan.

According to an article from the Web technology blog ReadWriteWeb, these “keitai shousetus” accounted for half of the 10 bestselling novels in Japan in 2007.

Following librarians on Twitter can point the way to some smart blog posts one might not otherwise discover. A recent post on Lisnews.org, for example, details the failure of e-book reader companies such as Amazon, Sony, Mobipocket and Ebooks to consider libraries as viable customers, and demands they treat libraries better on three counts:

(1) Write a terms of service exclusively for libraries. Stop ignoring libraries and start embracing us for the information and technology educators that we are.

(2) Write a service contract in which you provide us with devices and materials which we can then lend to patrons. (Leave it to us as to how we make them financially responsible for borrowing the readers.)

(3) You profit both literally and through increased exposure for your product to the public who might not otherwise be interested in your e-book reader. We profit with increased patronage, circulation numbers, and overall system usage statistics. It is a win-win-win for us, you, and our patrons.

The author, ”AndyW,” a librarian for the Burlington County Library System in New Jersey, writes a blog, Agnostic, Maybe, where the story also appeared. Lisnews.org is a collaborative blog about the world of Library and Information Science that was founded in 1999 by Blake Carver, who works as a librarian in Western New York State.

USA Today announces the birth of the “digi-novel,” called a “revolution in publishing for the YouTube generation,” by its creator, Anthony Zuiker, also the creator of the various CSI TV series.

The book, Level 26: Dark Origins, the first in a projected series, is supplemented by 20 three-minute online videos or “cyber-bridges.”

As USA Today points out, this isn’t the first effort to combine text and online; 39 Clues and Patrick Carman’s Skeleton Creek.

There is also the grand-daddy of them all, the Cathy’s Book series, which uses Web sites, phone numbers and emails to create “Fourth Wall” interactive stories. The final book in the series, Cathy’s Ring came out last week, see below.

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(Cover is from the publishers catalog, p 24, and may change)
Level 26: Dark Origins (Dark Chronicles)
Anthony E. Zuiker and Duane Swierczynski

Mystery reviewer Sarah Weinman is impressed with the choice of Swierczynski as co-author.

Also in audio from Penguin Audio

The upcoming titles in the series are:

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Cathy’s Ring Sean Stewart, Jordan Weisman Price: $17.95 Hardcover: 144 pages Publisher: Running Press Kids – (2009-05-04) ISBN-10: 0762435305 ISBN-13: 9780762435302