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Once upon last May, the Kindle DX seemed like a great academic tool for Princeton University classrooms. But students and professors have since begun to voice some discomfort.

"I hate to sound like a Luddite, but this technology is a poor excuse of an academic tool," said Aaron Horvath '10, a student in Civil Society and Public Policy, in a Daily Princetonian interview. "It's clunky, slow and a real pain to operate."

Barnes and Noble first tipped their hand in July, when they announed their new e-book store and its 700,000 titles would be made available on the iPhone and BlackBerry platforms. Then in August, the bookseller announced a partnership with e-reader maker iRex, in addition to love for Plastic Logic and their devices. And today (drumroll, please) the company officially announced the iRex DR800SG reader, the first e-book reader with access to the Barnes and Noble catalog.

Today, Amazon announced a new Kindle e-reader that has a bigger screen -- 9.7 inches diagonally -- and a bigger price tag: 489 smackeroos. So should you fork out $130 more than the last Kindle for the new version? We can't say for sure until we get to play with it for a while, but here's a preliminary guide based on the specs and our quick demo at today's press conference.

After a trip to the Amazon jungle, President Teddy Roosevelt famously reported seeing a pack of piranhas devour a cow in a few minutes. It must have been a very large school of fish—-or a very small cow. According to Ray Owczarzak, assistant curator of fishes at the National Aquarium in Baltimore, it would probably take 300 to 500 piranhas five minutes to strip the flesh off a 180-pound human. But would this attack even happen?

Make no mistake about it: The original Kindle ebook reader was an amazing device -- the first ereader to engender feelings of love. Tying a lightweight screen to Amazon's book collection with a free 3G wireless connection was genius, and easily earned our Best of What's New kudos.

Fortune has an interesting profile of Amazon.com CEO and founder Jeff Bezos, who has persisted, and seen his company grow, through the ups and downs of the dot-com economy. Presently he's worth around $8 billion, which isn't too bad. In addition to recounting his rise to prominence, the piece also details his plans to transform Amazon into the Web's biggest retailer of digital media. Hence Amazon's e-book reader, the Kindle, and the company's push into the MP3 space, where it's trying to unseat Apple as emperor. Apparently this is a pretty heated competition: According to the Fortune piece, he refuses to use the word "Apple."

After six months of operation, the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) XO laptop has logged its first major success story: Peru. Kids love ‘em, administrators love ‘em, parents love ‘em and Nicholas Negroponte is ecstatic. Loaded with approximately 100 copyright-free books (are you listening Amazon.com?), the XO has become exactly the empowering tool that Negroponte predicted. This success story is not without its minor hiccups, however. Although targeted for 9,000 Peruvian elementary, only about 4,000 of these schools have Internet access. Nonetheless, OLPC is working with Peru to surmount this obstacle.—Dave Prochnow

(Image: laptopgiving.org)

Thats right, the hot-selling ASUS Eee PC is now available in colors. Granted, this isnt the flagship, Eee PC 4G model, its the 2G-Surf flavor, but at least you now have the luxury of selecting from three odd color choices: blush pink, sky blue, and lush green. Each color is served up at a tasty $299.99 from J&R Music and Computer World via the venerable Amazon.com. At first blush, that price and color might look tempting, but beware that there are more differences between the 4G and the 2G-Surf than just a 50% smaller flash drive. Missing is the built-in webcam and the 2G model also sports lighter weight 4400 mAh batteries.—Dave Prochnow

(Image: Amazon.com)