When filmmakers take a guess at how the future will look like, in most cases paper has disappeared, with commuters reading their dailies on electronic papers (Caprica, the Battlestar Galactica spin-off, is the latest to show such possibilities). With today's economics woes, it appears that most newspapers will cease to exist in their print form in the next few years (even the Boston Globe and the New York Times are threatened).

However, today's announcement from Amazon could bring some relief to print journalists. This summer, Amazon plans to release the Kindle DX, an 9,7-inch portable reader. The DX, which is much larger than previous Kindle models, sports wireless capabilities and has been specifically designed to display newspapers, magazines and textbooks. In fact, copies of the reader will be subsidized by the New York Times, the Boston Globe and the Wall Street Journal for its subscribers. One caveat, said subscribers have to out of reach of their paper's delivery trucks.

Newspapers, if they accept to offer the readers to all their subscribers, could benefit greatly from the Kindle DX and subsequent electronic readers (News Corporation is said to be working on its own). Much like the iPod revolutionised the music market online, the Kindle DX could allow newspapers to go back to paid content without losing (a lot) of their readers.

For more information about the Kindle DX, click here.