Amazon’s Kindle DX finally has a release date. It will arrive at market nine days from today. In a brief announcement issued this morning, Amazon (AMZN) said its new e-book reader, which boasts both a larger screen and price tag than its predecessor, will ship on June 10 with orders prioritized on a first-come, first-served basis.

According to Amazon, the DX will save the newspaper industry–or at least momentarily reverse its declining fortunes–and revolutionize the college textbook market as well. But with a price tag of $489–$130 more than the Kindle 2–that may be bit of a stretch.

We’ll see on June 10.

Turns out Benjamin Disraeli was wrong. There are four, not three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, statistics and Motion Picture Association of America piracy figures.

The MPAA this week admitted that a 2005 study that blamed a significant portion of the film industry’s domestic losses on college movie pirates was erroneous. Touted as “the most accurate and detailed assessment of the film industry’s worldwide losses to piracy,” the study (PDF), described piracy as “the biggest threat to the U.S. motion picture industry” and attributed an astonishing 44% of MPAA company losses in the U.S. to college students.

Hollywood was quick to seize on that statistic and used it as the foundation of a campaign against file-sharing on college networks that would ultimately result in the Curb Illegal Downloading on College Campuses Act, the demonization of the “Top 25 Piracy Schools” and the Higher Education Reform Act, which ties federal higher-education funding to efforts to combat piracy.

Trouble is, that 44% figure was a gross overstatement. In fact, the MPAA now says, just 15% of the movie industry’s domestic losses can be attributed to campus piracy. How did it happen that the study nearly tripled that figure? “Human error,” says the MPAA.

Ah. Well that explains it, then. Makes you wonder about all those other sky-is-falling piracy studies we’ve been bombarded with over the years though, doesn’t it?

“If the reports are true that the new, corrected numbers are way below the initial and highly publicized earlier numbers, then the MPAA owes an apology to the campus community,” Kenneth Green, director of the Campus Computing Project, told Inside Higher Ed. “The corrected MPAA numbers clearly confirm what many of us have said for a very long time: that P2P piracy is primarily a consumer broadband issue, not primarily a campus network issue, and that colleges and universities are more concerned and far more engaged in efforts to stem illegal P2P activity than are consumer broadband providers.”

MySpace is still home for Latino/Hispanic teens, immigrant teens, ‘burnouts,’ ‘alternative kids,’ ‘art fags,’ punks, emos, goths, gangstas, queer kids and other kids who didn’t play into the dominant high-school popularity paradigm. These are kids whose parents didn’t go to college, who are expected to get a job when they finish high school. Teens who are really into music or in a band are on MySpace. MySpace has most of the kids who are socially ostracized at school because they are geeks, freaks, or queers.

“The goody two-shoes, jocks, athletes, or other ‘good’ kids are now going to Facebook. These kids tend to come from families who emphasize education and going to college. They are part of what we’d call hegemonic society. They are primarily white, but not exclusively. They are in honors classes, looking forward to the prom and live in a world dictated by after-school activities.”

Ah. So it’s “socs” and “greasers” all over again, is it? And the fact that Facebook membership was originally restricted to folks with a college or university email address doesn’t have anything to do with it? Just wondering …