The holiday season is finally upon us, and there is no better time to pick up an e-book reader. Barnes and Nobles has already announced the Nook, and you can always trust Amazon Kindle as your next e-book reader. Add Sony Readers to those, and you have a few decent options if you are looking to pick up a brand new e-book reader or gift one to your friends and family members. Choosing an e-book reader is not that difficult. Most of the top ones come with a standard set of features. It really comes down to those small details. In this series, I intend to go over those details to help those who have not owned an e-book reader before decide what unit to go with.

Before talking about any specific e-book reader, it’s essential to go over a few factors that you should consider before picking up an e-reader.  Here are the factors that you should pay attention to before buying an e-reader:

• Brand: brand is important. When you purchase a device from Amazon or Barnes and Nobles, you know you are covered after you have parted with your money. Make sure you read the forums to find out how these companies have dealt with their past customers.
• Display Size: I personally prefer larger e-book readers, but 6 inch screens seem to be standard at this point. Kindle DX is the best large screen e-reader on the market for those looking for such device.
• Storage: internal storage is important, especially if you intend to take a lot of books with you on the go. Having the option to expand your internal memory with SD cards matter as well.
• Doc Formats: the most important buying factor for many people. If you intend to read ePub or PDF files on your e-book reader, make sure your e-reader can handle those files.
• Battery Life: the last thing you want to do is buy another gadget that requires you to charge your battery every day or so. Kindle can go for 14 days per charge while Nook can go for 10 days.
• PPI: Pixel Per Inch is something a lot of folks don’t pay attention to. It’s true that most e-book readers come with similar PPIs these days. But if you are a perfectionist, you may want to take time to figure this out before picking up a unit.
• Gray Level: the higher the better. As simple as that. If you want to enjoy a better reading quality on your e-reader, you want a device that comes with a higher gray level.
• Content: if you are picking up an e-book reader, you have to know where your content will come from.
• Wireless: most e-book readers take advantage of AT&T’s wireless service these days. Kindle DX is still on Sprint, but that could change soon as well.
• Resolution: yet another factor that determines how rich your reading experience will be on your e-book reader.
• Price: you won’t be able to find a dirt cheap e-book reader these days. But some e-readers are more expensive than others. For instance, if you don’t need a large screen reader, you can save $200 by getting a Kindle 2 instead of Kindle DX.

Choosing an e-book reader is not that difficult. Most of the top e-book readers today come with similar features as far as the above factors are concerned. There are still differences, which is why everyone should take time to compare e-readers based on the above factors to find the one that comes with everything you need to read books on the road. Fear not as we will cover the specific units that you may want to consider picking up for this holiday season.

We have been hearing about color-screen Kindle for a few months now. In fact, Amazon was testing color Kindles last year. Analysts claimed at the time that Amazon simply failed to find a way to offer color screen on Kindle and keep the prices low. But there are a lot of rumors on the Internet about Amazon adding color E-Ink technology to Kindle 3.0. The details are sketchy about what Amazon plans to do with Kindle 3.0 (which is expected to be released later this year) and Kindle 4.0, but the gadgets that are already using color e-paper technology give us a glimpse into Kindle’s future.

A lot of people have given Amazon Kindle flak over the past few months for not properly supporting color e-books. It’d be hard to see what these folks will complain about once Amazon implements that feature. I do believe that e-books will have to compete with v-books (video) in the near future. So in the end, color E-ink technology may not be that much of a game changer. But it will still be a nice feature to have on future e-book readers.

I don’t know about you but I am addicted to Twitter. Everywhere I go, I am constantly reading what others are contributing to the community and try to get involved myself. When I got my Kindle, I didn’t expect to use it for tweeting, but now I can see why folks would badly want to “tweendle.” So I decided to do a little experiment on my Kindle to see whether tweendling full-time is possible or not.

Here are my results:

• Crashes: the system crashed on me 6 out of 10 times. For some reason Kindle browser failed to communicate with Twitter 60% of the time. Not too promising but still better than nothing.
• Typing pain: call me spoiled but typing on Kindle is just a pain. And I managed to click the wrong button a bunch of times. The buttons are so small (and my fingers are too big) that I always end up pushing multiple buttons at the same time.
• Short Sentences: Tweendling is possible if you avoid using all 140 characters that are available to you on Twitter. Short tweets work just fine from Kindle. Long tweets didn’t work out too well.
• Mobile Web: Kindle registers as Mobile Web on Twitter. I guess that’s what Kindle browser is. It still has ways to go to become a real browser.

Verdict: Tweendling is very much possible. If you are addicted to Twitter, you can access your Twitter account all the time from your Kindle. Here is hoping that Amazon will provide better support for Twitter and other similar services with Kindle 2.0 and beyond.

How’s been your tweendling experience?

I have heard a lot of people complain about the number of blogs that are available for subscription on Kindle. After all, people like to read anything they like on their Kindles and not be limited to Boing Boing or Slash Dot. But the truth is, you can read any blog you want on your Kindle for free! Thanks to the little miracle service called BlogLines. All you have to do is add your feeds to your Bloglines account and then use your Kindle browser to read them on a daily basis.

But here is the bigger problem. Not all blogs are meant to be read on Kindle. Those that are image heavy or not code compliant make look awkward on Kindle. Now if you are hoping to get the latest industry number from a report on a text heavy blog, then Kindle will do just fine. But as of now, Kindle is not yet ready for Prime time for blog freaks like me. Besides, who doesn’t want to monetize their blogs with Kindle. Right now, there is no easy way to monetize your blog on Kindle store. But industry insiders are telling us that the plan is to introduce a blog/feed solution for publishers to monetize their content. If that is true, then a whole lot of people are going to make a buck or two with this device, and all this would make Kindle even more attractive, but until then, I am going to stick with Bloglines and avoid those subscription fees (let’s hope Amazon doesn’t block Bloglines).

The Kindle nation has been really active about finding hidden shortcuts for the Kindle. There are simple shortcuts to start the minesweeper game or go directly to Wikipedia. There are just so many of them, but here are my favorite ones:

1. ALT + #: If you have 100 books on your Kindle, and want to see the books on your Nth page, then use ALT+N to go to that page. But you can do the same by just pressing the number!

2. Search @Wiki: Say you want to search Wikipedia for something fast and you are in the middle of reading a book, the best way to go is to use the search button and then type @Wiki.  The other shortcuts available are @Web and @store.

3. ALT + SHIFT + M: Mine Sweeper Game. Enough said.

4. ALT + SHIFT + A: Sort your documents based on when you received them on your Kindle.

5. ALT + SHIFT + R: Reset your Kindle if you are having major problems with it.

6. ALT + T: Time. Shows time on the left bottom side of your screen. Very handy!

Now there are a bunch of other short cuts that you can use to get more productive on Kindle. To be perfectly honest, the keys are too small to maneuver so short cuts can sometimes be a hassle. Having said that, I’ll put together a set of advanced shortcuts that are more than about just putting  time on your screen.

As you may have found out by now Kindle has a proprietary DRM in order to allow Amazon to protect their interest by restricting the number of times that you potentially share Kindle Content. So you may ask what the limits are. It’s hard to find but here it is:

• You can not share Amazon content between two Kindles that are registered under different Amazon accounts. That includes books, magazines, and subscriptions (unless of course you hack your Kindle).
• You cannot share subscriptions with any other Kindle regardless.
• You can share books between two Kindles registered under same account, but that would be only 6 times.
• Your books are stored online by Amazon and there is no limit as far as the number of times you can download an eBook.

So basically if you do not have eBooks (PDF or any other format) of your own, and you decide to go with Amazon content, you are pretty much limited to one Kindle. If your Kindle dies, you can transfer data to your new Kindle that is registered under the same Amazon account. Now this would be a fair deal if Amazon dropped the prices from $9.99 to $4.99 or something like that. I think $10 is too expensive especially since you can’t sell these books after you are done with them!