We reviewed the Amazon Kindle back in January of last year, and now Amazon is back with the Kindle 2. With an improved display (although not larger), sleek new design, and a new navigation joystick, plus text-to-speech, does the Amazon Kindle 2 win our praise? Read on after the break for more details and our final opinion.

While there aren’t as many improvements as people had hoped for, the new design is a welcome enhancement. The new display now has 16 shades of grey instead of four and makes text appear crisper and clearer. Page turns are also 20% faster than the original Kindle display. Check out the video below showing you a 360-degree spin of the new Kindle 2 design.

Gone is the SD expansion slot, replaced with 2GB of on-board memory. This isn’t a huge deal, since it’s enough to store over 1,500 books. In terms of software features, not much has changed besides tweaking location of certain functions such as search, which has now been relocated to a search bar at the bottom of your screen. One new feature, the only major one at least, is the addition of text-to-speech.

Any newspaper, magazine, book, or blog can be read out loud and pages turn automatically when being read, so you can sit back, relax, and enjoy your favorite book. We’re still wondering why Amazon hasn’t built in a backlight or a reading light, because reading the Kindle is virtually impossible in dim lighting. The battery isn’t user-replaceable either, which shouldn’t be a problem, but eventually it will need to be replaced. The process costs $80 to send the device to Amazon, and the process doesn’t replace the battery, but replaces the entire Kindle.

If you’re an avid reader, by all means, go out and get a Kindle. Buy it today from Amazon.com for $360 with free shipping. Still a hefty price, but well worth it for bookworms. We’ll be taking a look at the Kindle DX soon too.

Pros

• Enhanced design.
• New crisper and clearer display.
• Text-to speech functionality.

Cons

• No backlight.
• Still somewhat expensive.

Designing for Web Standards, Second Edition by Jeffery Zeldman is one of the best books out there for web designers that are interested in meeting W3C and DOCTYPE standards. The content of the book is excellent and most web designers swear by it. From learning how to compile great code, to making your websites look the best of the best in modern browsers, even discussing what those particular older browsers do to your new-age website.

Spark’d Rating: Highly recommended. Zeldman explains from beginning to end what web standards are and why they’re important. 5 out of 5 rating.

Publish and Prosper: Blogging for your Business by DL Byron and Steve Broback is a new book that explains how you can drive more traffic to your website/blog and get the best navigation possible for web usability. Byron and Broback also let you in on some tips to help keep your readership stable, for example, posting frequently and making content worthwhile. While being a short book compared to other books, this book is chock full of content to satisfy any blogger.

Spark’d Rating: Highly recommended for bloggers only. If you’re not a blogger, this book isn’t for you, but on the other hand, if you want to start blogging, check out this book. Great little tips for newer business blogs. 5 out of 5 rating.

The book, Ubuntu Hacks, covers the ins and outs of Linux in an easy and understandable format for Linux newbies to professional programmers. Ubuntu Hacks has all the information you need from installing and test driving Ubuntu Linux, to how to run a server using the Linux distribution.

Don’t want to switch from Windows to Linux completely? Learn how to dual-boot! Want to switch to Linux but is there a Windows app leaving you hanging? Learn how to use Cedega, the gaming virtualization tool for Linux, or Wine, the all-in-one tool for running applications from Microsoft Office to Adobe Photoshop.

Overall, this book tells you how to tweak Linux from start to finish, and how to keep everything in ship-shape. Although in this review, I’m not going to rate it for obvious reasons, but I can certainly recommend it for anyone looking to use Linux as their mainstream operating system, or even the geek just wanted to play around and get their hands dirty with another operating system.

Ubuntu Hacks is available online, or in many brick and mortar booksellers near you for a very reasonable price of $29.99 USD or $38.99 CAD. ISBN 0-596-52720-9

I’m not a book reviewing expert, but expect more books from O’Reilly and other fine book publishers to start appearing here soon.

by John Pastor, Senior Editor, Spark’d