Amazon Kindle, Nook, and other top e-book readers certainly make reading books on the go much easier. A lot of people are already using their e-book readers to move away from traditional books. But reading on e-book readers is not that straight forward if you are into using them at night. Most e-book readers don’t come with an integrated light, so you will need to pick up a reading light if you are to get a decent reading experience on your e-book reader. That’s where e-reader lights come in. They make it easier to read books in darker locations and don’t take too much space. But are they the only way to address this issue?

You’d be surprised to know how many people just assume e-readers on the market today come with backlight. After all, that’s what we have gotten used to with other gadgets such as the iPhone. But backlit e-readers are not on the horizon. Not at this point anyway. The E-ink technology is developed to simulate real reading experience, and that’s something that can’t happen with a backlight. Besides, backlight is one of the reason reading on your laptop strains your eyes.

It’s certainly inconvenient for people to have to pick up an e-reader light to get reading done in dark rooms. But would you read a book without a light? I would personally prefer having the option to have the feature and have the ability to turn it on and off, and but that doesn’t seem to be in the cards as far as E-ink based e-book readers are concerned. Of course, e-book reader makers could always surprise us all.

Amazon has been very slow to take advantage of its leading position in the e-book market to develop hardware/software that would allow publishers to introduce their dynamic content on Amazon Kindle. Time Inc., News Corp., Conde Nast, Hearst Corp., and Meredith Corp. plan to change all that by developing a color solution that does their content justice.This new platform will emphasize on visuals and allow consumers to not only get a rich reading experience on their devices, but it will also enable them to play games, watch video, and more.

Let’s face it. Amazon Kindle and other e-book readers on the market are too one dimensional. As much as some like their e-book reader to be that way, that’s not where the industry is going. This new platform will be more inclusive:

The genesis of this idea is to build a fully featured kind of immersive e-reading application that can render our content beautifully on those devices that come to market

News Corp. and its executives have bashed Kindle in the past and talked about their plan to find another solution to grow their business. This new standard sounds like an ambitious plan that would allow them to do just that. These content publishers not only have to share a significant portion of their revenue with Amazon, they also have to deal with Amazon’s controlling ways. With their own platform, access to customers data and more information wouldn’t be too much of an issue.

It’s still not known whether this new platform can succeed. Let’s be honest about it. Nobody likes to pay for content these days. And there are plenty of places that you can get your content for free or close to it. Maybe this partnership will allow these top companies to reduce their prices. There have also been a lot of talks about e-book advertising platforms. But how these companies intend to pull all this together without taking away from their customers’ reading experience is a question for another day.

Your take: will 2010 be the year that Amazon finally gets aggressive with its Kindle strategy?

What a busy week it was for Amazon and Kindle owners. First, we saw Amazon drop its price on Kindle 2.0 by $60 as a part of its overall strategy to get more people to commit to this cool gadget. And this time Amazon thought of its recently acquired customers by providing a $60 refund to the folks who bought their Kindles recently. The last thing Amazon wants to deal with is customer backlash. As mentioned on this blog, the price drop is not what a lot of us were hoping for, but it still puts more gap between Kindle and Kindle DX, which should help customers better decide between the two. Since a lot of publishers are now deciding to make their products available on Kindle, owning one of these gadgets is quickly becoming a no brainer.

There are some not-so-good news for Kindle users here as well. The Kindle platform is growing rapidly, which means it’s the matter of time before Amazon monetizes its platform with ads. We are already hearing about in-book and contextual advertising on Kindle. Nobody knows what the exact details will be, but if your an advertiser or a publisher, you are likely to have more options to generate leads and make some money from your work.

The web was flooded with stories about a new wave of Kindle killers coming out in the future. We already know about Apple and Google and their plans to challenge Amazon in the e-book market. But Robert Murdoch won’t be going after Kindle for now. If you are in Asia, you can settle for one of these Kindle 2 knock offs that looks awfully close to the real thing and costs less too. You only see that happening on the other side of the world. Why not? Amazon has yet to lay out a clear plan for its global market as far as Kindle is concerned.

Picture Courtesy of ZDnet

There are a few brave men and women among us that go to uncharted territories to explore the life inside of new gadgets. The folks at Tech Republic are certainly in this category. I just saw inside the Kindle done by these guys, and I got to say that I am utterly impressed by their bravery. The fact that they took it upon themselves to open a Kindle, knowing that it may not work once you put it back together deserves praise.

Now I don’t think Kindle is more of an state of the art than iPhone, but it is interesting to see what makes all this work. Take a peek here.

Wired has a story on Kindle which is quite intriguing. It seems both Cindy Mccain and Michelle Obama have been working double shift on their biographies, and those will be released first to Kindle users. Now that is a brilliant idea if it was used for more serious books. Think about it. Let’s say you are a programmer, and you can get the latest book about Flex 4 on Kindle a month before it comes out. Doesn’t that give you a clear edge over those who don’t have Kindle?