Anyone who received a gadget this year has felt the need to purchase add-ons, customizations, or accessories for whatever Santa brought them this year.  It may be an extra SD card for your ereader or a Flash card for your camera.  It might be a car charger for your new mobile phone, a case for your Kindle, or a cover for your Nook.  Whatever your need, there are a few sites that can help you find what you need to customize your new gear.

eAccessories – electronic accessories for your mobile devices from ereaders to mobile phones to tablet PCs.  eAccessories specializes in eReader accessories for the Alex, BeBook, Kindle, Kobo, Nook, and Pandigital Novel.  They also have information about where to find Apple iPad and Samsung Galaxy Tab accessories including cases, covers, screens, and chargers.

Read Pads – focusing on ereader news and hardware, here you’ll find information on Apple iPads, Kindles, Kobos, Pandigital Novels, Nooks, Samsung Galaxy Tabs, and Sony Readers.

eCovers – specializing specifically on cases and covers for ereaders, this web site covers ereader cases and covers for the Kindle, Nook, Sony Reader, Alex, Kobo, and Pandigital Novel.

Nook Share – covering Barnes & Noble’s Nook and information about where to find Nook covers, cases, and accessories – as well as up to date news and information about new models and features.

Barnes & Noble’s new Nook Color ($250) is the first major ebook reader with a color touch screen (Amazon’s Kindle is still black and white with no plans to change soon). It has only been one year since the release of the first (black-and-white) Nook, but already it has gained market share and features, which Barnes & Noble says is due to former Palm employees designing it out of a new shop in Silicon Valley.

The color screen is bright and beautiful. Magazines, for example, look spectacular. You can subscribe to any of 70 magazines (the first two weeks are free) or buy individual issues. Some magazines even have an Article View: a scrolling, vertical, uncluttered column of black-on-white text that’s easy to read. The original magazine layout lies behind it for context.

Children’s books also benefit enormously from color, and they get special treatment on the Color Nook. You can tap the text on any page to enlarge it. Some titles — 300 by year’s end, according to Barnes & Noble — offer a ‘Read to Me’ button, so that your young reader can follow along with a recorded voice. This raises the question, “Was the Nook Color specifically designed for kids?” We may never know, but we know that if you can get a child used to a technology young, you’ll have a customer for life.

Need nook covers or accessories?

Read Pads has an article about a school district in Florida that has decided to purchase Amazon Kindle’s for all of their students in order to save on textbook costs. The Ledger reports that the school is happy to have made the switch to digital editions of books.

One bad reading habit – skipping over big words – can no longer be justified by excuses like, “I didn’t have a dictionary,” because the Kindle has a built-in dictionary, which displays definitions for highlighted words. “It helps with reading comprehension,” said senior Bennie Niles, 17.

Another feature he is excited about is the text-to-speech capability. Press a button, and a well-inflected computer voice says the word aloud.

And learning curve? For students who do not know a world without mobile computing, no big deal. “It’s just like texting,” said senior Gabrielle Adams, 17, about inputting notes. “And everybody knows how to text,” Niles said.  Read the full article here.