Nearly one month after Amazon.com, Inc. previewed the large-screen Kindle DX, the company announced that the new device will ship on June 10, 2009 on a first-come, first-served shipping schedule for pre-orders.

While the company thinks the new device could revolutionize both periodical and textbook reading, skeptics have emerged over the last month. Frank Lyman, EVP of marketing at CourseSmart, told GalleyCat that most students are reading e-books on laptops. During a BEA panel discussion, Daily Beast editor Tina Brown criticized the $9.99 price-tag that most Amazon e-books carry.

Here’s more from the Amazon release: “[Kindle DX features] a large 9.7-inch electronic paper display, built-in PDF reader to view professional and personal documents, auto-rotate capability, and storage for up to 3,500 books. More than 290,000 books are now available in the Kindle Store for convenient wireless delivery in under 60 seconds.”

As Amazon.com Inc. entered the e-textbook market today at a packed press conference, they joined a number of other players jockeying for student readers. To find out more, GalleyCat interviewed Frank Lyman, EVP of marketing at CourseSmart–a company that sells more than 6,300 e-textbooks for laptop readers.

Lyman wasn’t worried about his new competitor: “I suspect that the [Amazon Kindle] switch will be slow compared with the switch to eTextbooks on the laptop. That is likely why Amazon is pursuing a pilot approach to textbook versus the major launch of their trade book business. In other words, they have a lot to learn about just what will drive college students to switch to a Kindle. In the meantime, 82 percent of students have laptops (per ECAR’s 2008 study), and it stands to reason that the market for eTextbooks will develop on laptops much more rapidly than through a dedicated device like the Kindle.”

He continued: “The lack of color in a Kindle also makes the Kindle experience likely less viable as a print substitute than the online eTextbook experience (think four color Biology illustrations) … our research with students suggests there is real value in having an eTextbook that is integrated with other learning tools available on the laptop (e.g. Google, Blackboard, Wikipedia, Microsoft Word/Excel, YouTube, etc.).”

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