Typically, translating any book into braille more than doubles its thickness. But with e-books that doesn’t have to happen. Designer Seon-Keun Park, Byung-Min Woo, Sun-Hye Woo and Jin-Sun Park want more blind people to be able to enjoy books, so they created this Braille e-book concept.

The idea is that this is a braille Kindle. Using EAP technology, it can change the surface pattern via an electromagnetic signal that will simulate braille text. It’s an elegant and simple solution that would enrich the lives of blind readers quite a bit.

These Pixel art book jackets really add to your geek cred. They are a great way to not only dress up your books, but to add some decorative nerd-flair to your home.

The folks over at icoeye have compiled a great guide and a PDF that you can download to add some geeky style to your library. Pretty cool. You can download the template to create your own designs too.

There’s still some time left to find cool robot gifts for Xmas. Behold The Botropolis 2008 Christmas gift guide, fresh from our robot site Botropolis. We have you covered.

Everything from robot ornaments, to talking Dalek alarm clocks, to robot kits you can build yourself, to T-shirts. Fear the one’s that scientists are building, but love the one’s that you can buy, that’s our motto. Hit the link for all kinds of robot gifts fit for any stocking.

Some of us still read actual paper books at night in bed. If you are not alone in bed, that can be a problem. An overhead light just won’t work. Even a typical small lamp will keep your significant other awake.

So if you’re going to invest in a quality lamp to read by, consider something like this odd little lamp. It has the quirky design of a miniature man reading a book, and the book functions as a lampshade. He’s made from polished zinc, and could actually be considered a small piece of art as well. He’s only £28.50.

ECTACO has nothing to do with a taco, yet they have some pretty big ideas about the future of reading books and they are not afraid to let you know. The company says that it’s jetBook reader will allow you to, “Kiss your old-fashioned, dusty library goodbye,” and that’s good because “Not a single tree was cut down to make it!” It’s obviously a life changing device.

Plus it’s bright red and we all know that red is better then a plain old Kindle any day. The device has a 5-inch grayscale display, multi-language support, and bookmarking ability, plus playback of MP3 files, and an SD slot. The red harbinger of death to real books, and savior of trees will cost you $349.95, which might make some of us as red in the face as the device.