Amazon has been busily updating its Kindle lineup over the past few years, and now its flagship Fires and Paperwhite have media consumption covered. Along the way the massive Kindle DX has been ignored—and now it seems the device is being discontinued.

A big graphite Kindle DX. A super fast 4G WiMax Wi-Fi Hotspot. A bamboo laptop. For all the mobile warriors who demand the biggest, fastest and eco-friendliest, your devices are now available.

The Kindle DX gets refreshed today with a lower price of $379, and a 9.7-inch screen with 50 percent better contrast. It also happens to come in a graphite finish. Ships on July 7th but orders start now.

A whole cottage industry has sprung up around the idea of modifying Moleskine notebooks to house gadgets, and now the historic brand is getting in on the action themselves: they're offering an official, no-modding-necessary Moleskine cover for the Kindle.

Amazon recently introduced an international version of the Kindle 2, and today confirmed a similar international Kindle DX. As the international Kindle 2 is $20 more than the domestic, the Kindle DX could see a price bump as well. [TechFlash]

Bad news for Amazon, who's hoping that in the future all college students will read their textbooks through the oversided Kindle DX: the first students to use it, at Princeton, are not fans.

With the Sony Reader Daily Edition, the 3G-enabled ebook reader battle is pitched. At the end of this year, it'll fight Amazon's Kindle 2 and DX and Plastic Logic's eReader to the death. Here's how they all stack up now:

They're hugely different devices, sure, but could the iPhone be stepping on the Kindle's toes again? CourseSmart, which offers subsciption-based, notes-capable eBooks online, has released a full-featured iPhone app for their subscribers. In other words, yes.

Nicholson Baker of the venerable New Yorker decided to try out Amazon's Kindle to see if it was really the future of reading. He wrote a whopping 6,300 words on the subject, but allow me to summarize: it sucks.