Kindle 2 in Press!

Amazon.com launched today the second generation of its Kindle e-book reader that is even better than the first generation. The new gadget has enough memory to hold as many as 1,500 books, boasts 25 percent better battery life, and provides an in-built speech synthesizer for reading the ebook aloud. The Kindle 2 is available for pre-order with price tag of $359, and it will ship in two weeks (in February 24). The device is just smaller than netbooks are: it is only just over a third of an inch thick, and weighs about 10 ounces. The next generation Kindle should be more user-friendly than the first generation, as it has been added buttons to make it easy to flip pages. In addition, it has a new five-way controller that provides the functionality for note-taking and highlighting the text. It even supports automatically Kindle 2 definitions, that are pulled from the New Oxford American Dictionary. These definitions appear instantly at the bottom of the screen.

The display uses a decent resolution of 600x800 that shows 16 shades of gray, compared to the 4 shades of the original Kindle. Kindle 2 does not use any backlighting which should make the display easier for the eye and the battery life as well.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos describes the changes with following words:

Kindle 2 is everything customers tell us they love about the original Kindle, only thinner, faster, crisper, with longer battery life, and capable of holding hundreds more books. If you want, Kindle 2 will even read to you — something new we added that a book could never do.

Why don't you do yourself a service and order the second generation Kindle today to make sure you are one of the first to get your hands on the new gadget? Use the Amazon.com banner on the left column to order the Kindle directly from Amazon!

Download free ebooks

Most people might think that the ebook readers are good only for reading commercially published ebooks. In addition to the commercial publishings, there is available a wide selection of free online books. Some of them are published as plain text, some are html formatted web pages, and, finally, some of the free ebooks are nicely formatted pdf files.

If you are looking for free ebooks, try these:

* Free-ebooks.net
* Project Gutenberg

There are many more free online collections of ebooks, but these are certainly legal texts.

Sony's reader is a competitor to Kindle

Sony has released information about PRS-700BC digital ebook reader which seems a very tough competitor to Amazon Kindle. At the moment Sony sets the standards for ebook reader markets as the reader seems to be very easy to use with no keyboard. Instead of a keyboard, the reader utilizes a six inch touchscreen for browsing.

One cool feature of Sony PRS-700 is its support for many different media formats. It can be used for reading digital books, pdf documents, word files and other text file formats. One can eaven play mp3s with the ebook reader!

See more information here.