What’s new in the new Kindle:

• Lighter Than a Paperback: The new Kindle has a 21 percent smaller body but keeps the  6-inch-size reading area.  At 8.7 ounces, it’s lighter than a paperback book and thinner than a magazine.
• Has Double the Storage. Holds 3,500 Books.
• Share Passages: Share meaningful passages with with built-in Twitter and Facebook integration.
• Up To One Month of Battery Life with the wireless off.  Otherwise, it can go 10 days between charges.
• Quieter Page Turn Buttons: Read all night without disturbing your partner.
• Improved PDF Reader: Look up words, make notes and highlights, and use password protection.
• Surf the Web (experimental): The new article mode converts a clunky Web story into a more readable form.
• New Voice Guide: This is a boon to people with vision problems. With Text-to-Speech, Kindle can read out loud to you.  New Text-to-Speech enabled menus allow customers to navigate Kindle without having to read menu options. In addition to listening to books aloud, users now have the option of listening to content listings on the home screen, item descriptions, and all menu options

What Stays the Same

• Free 3G Wireless on the $189 version: No annual contracts and no monthly fees.
• Global Wireless Coverage: Travel the globe and still get books in under 60 seconds with wireless coverage in over 100 countries and territories.
• Massive Selection: The Kindle Store has over 630,000 books, including 109 of 111 New York Times Best Sellers, plus audiobooks, periodicals and blogs.
• Free, Out-of-Copyright Books: Over 1.8 million free, out-of-copyright, pre-1923 books such as “Pride and Prejudice” are available to read on Kindle.
• Free Book Samples: First chapters of Kindle books are available to download and read for free before you decide to buy.
• Low Book Prices: Over 510,000 of the 630,000 books in the Kindle Store are $9.99 or less, including 80 New York Times Best Sellers.
• Archive: Books purchased from the Kindle Store are automatically backed up online in your Kindle library on Amazon where they can be re-downloaded wirelessly for free.
• Read Everywhere with Whispersync: Read eBooks on your Kindle, iPhone, iPad, PC, Mac, BlackBerry, and Android-based devices.  It saves your place so you can pick up where you left off.

Both Kindles are available for pre-order at Amazon.com. They arrive August 27. For our money, the $189 version with 3G is a much better option than the Wi-Fi only one,  if you’re a frequent traveler. Too many places don’t get a good Wi-Fi signal and you may want to download today’s newspaper on a sunny beach in Spain.  But if you have Wi-Fi in the home, you can always download your books and blogs at home and then go on journeys abroad or beyond the reach of a Wi-Fi signal. For an extra sum, you can get a cover with an integrated light for reading at night.

If you want to find a celebrity on Twitter, try Twitter.com/celebrity name, where you fill in the name of anyone you want to follow. But often the celebrity isn’t there because a squatter has taken the site first. This book lists most of the biggies.

Disappointing Celebrity Tweets

The really surprising thing is how few celebrities have interesting tweets. There’s J.K. Rowling, writer of the Harry Potter series, who tweets at twitter.com/jk_rowling. Don’t bother going there. Despite over 181,000 followers, she has just three tweets. Tom Hanks and Anne Hathaway are also disappointing, and Hilary Duff’s account has been suspended twitter.com/MissHilaryDuff.

Better But Not Great Celebrity Tweets

Twitter.com/dameElizabeth is Elizabeth Taylor’s site. Very personal.

Twitter.com/MrDannyGlover has links to a few short films and his favorite causes.

Twitter.com/RealHughJackman shares his travel schedule.

The book lists Twitter addresses for celebrities in the following categories:

• Actors/Directors/Producers
• Comedians
• Journalists
• Music
• Personalities
• Politics
• Sports
• TV shows
• Writers

Our favorite category isn’t there. For tech tweets, we like Twitter.com/pcmag, Twitter.com/pcworld,Twitter.com/engadget and  Twitter.com/pogue.

To find more celebrities, go to twitter.com/celebtweetlist.

If Amazon were to count  its free books, the sales figures would be even higher.

• Over the past month, for every 100 hardcover books Amazon.com has sold, it has sold 180 Kindle books.
• The Association of American Publishers’ latest data reports that e-book sales grew 163 percent in the month of May and 207 percent year-to-date through May.  
• On July 6, Hachette Publishing announced that best-selling novelist James Patterson had sold 1.14 million e-books to date.  Of those, 867,881 were Kindle books.
• Five authors—Charlaine Harris, Stieg Larsson, Stephenie Meyer, James Patterson, and Nora Roberts—have each sold more than 500,000 Kindle books.

The Kindle Store has more than 630,000 books, including New Releases and 106 of 110 New York Times Best Sellers.  Over 1.8 million free, pre-1923 books are also available on the Kindle.

If you’re thinking of making money off an iPhone or iPad app, there are lots of things you may not have thought of. Most of them are in this book.  What’s great are the first person accounts from successful iPhone developers, such as Josh Williams, founder of Gowalla, a popular social networking site. The developers discuss all the decisions they went through, from what colors to use to problems when people with wide fingers didn’t know they’d tapped an icon because they didn’t see it react. The same decisions and problems discussed here would apply to making apps for the new Android phones, though the Android is not directly addressed.

With its big pictures, jazzy writing style, and great ideas for using your iPad, this book is a winner. You might not have thought of transferring university courses to your iPad, but you can. You can also put in parental controls, transfer movies, fill out forms and get directions. The author has written several best-selling computer books and moonlights as a stand-up comic. Once we got the feeling that this was rushed out the door: He said “right-click” when he meant “tap. ” There is no right-click on the iPad.

“iPad, the Missing Manual,” by J.D. Biersorfer, $32 from missingmanuals.com.

Biersorfer writes the weekly computer Q&A column for the New York Times. This book is nothing if not thorough. From turning your iPad on and off to preserving the battery, it gives you tips and tricks you’ll want to know. Organize your bookmarks, save a photo you saw on the web and turn it into your iPad’s background image, make shortcuts to your favorite websites available from the home screen and transfer a library of free books. Actually, it turns out that any free book you download to your computer from Gutenberg.org is probably already available for free, using the free iPad’s iBook app. We added “The Origin of the Species,” “Peter Pan,” and “The Circular Staircase,” a 1908 crime mystery by the author who created “femjep.” This stands for “female jeopardy,” a sub-genre in which the heroine is in trouble and must be rescued.

If you ever go to science fiction convention or a hobby show, you will usually see some amazing displays of what you can build with LEGO blocks. We don’t mean just buildings or busts of famous people; we mean operating toy trains, cranes, cars and robots. The book contains plans and instructions for making robots using the using the LEGO Mindstorms NXT 2.0 set. This costs around $280 but those who have it say they love it. The kit has parts, motors and – most important of all: a programmable logic block containing the microchips for controlling the robots.

• 69 percent freely divulged their physical location.
• 28 percent chatted with strangers.

Of those who chatted with strangers:

• 43 percent shared their first name.
• 24 percent shared their email address.
• 18 percent posted photos of themselves.
• 12 percent posted their cell phone number.

A nice book on this topic is “A Smart Girl’s Guide to the Internet: How to Connect with Friends, Find what you Need and Stay Safe Online.” It has quizzes and lots of cartoons for easy reading. Get it at AmericanGirl.com or here for $10.

Some will still want an iPad because of all its apps. But the Kindle DX comes with free 3G wireless. To get 3G on the iPad, you have to pay $15 a month plus an extra $100 initially. This would pay for a second Kindle DX in about 18 months.

Comparing the big  Kindle to the small one, you get much nicer charts and pictures, although they’re still in gray e-ink. On the plus side, like the small Kindle, it’s really easy on your eyes. Still, we prefer the smaller Kindle for $189, because it’s so lightweight.

Here’s the press release.

You can read Kindle books on your Android phone now. There are 620,000 book titles, mostly for $10, though classics tend to be free. You don’t need to own a Kindle to do this.

That brings the list of devices that Kindle books can be read on to nine:  Kindle, Kindle DX, BlackBerry, iPad, iPhone, iPod touch, Mac, PC, and  Android-powered phones. On all of those devices, you can read sample chapters before you buy, and go right to where you left off, no matter which device you turn to. The screen brightness can be adjusted, as well as the background color, font color and font size.

Get it at amazon.com/kindleforandroid and can download the free app from Android Market.

Here are some highlights from their press release:

The Kindle is a 3G wireless portable reader that lets you start reading any book in their 600,000 book library within 60 seconds. It has no monthly fees or annual contracts, and the largest selection of popular books. Recently, 109 of 112 New York Times bestsellers and new releases were for sale for $10. Over 1.8 million out-of-copyright, pre-1923 books are available for free.

Should you get an iPad or a Kindle?Here’s our comparison.

What about all the other e-Readers out there? Here’s a summary from Consumer Reports.