I adore my Sony e-book reader, and it’s perfect for novels. But one of its big drawbacks is its size, which makes it difficult for reading technical books or any document that benefits from a large format. That’s why I was happy to see the Plastic Logic reader in production.

What the Plastic Logic reader does:

From ebooks to newspapers, magazines and blogs, the Plastic Logic reader is designed to support a range of open document formats. These include such standard and widely available formats as PDF, ePub and Microsoft Office document types.

I can’t wait until it’s ready for prime time. Meanwhile, watch the preview:

Preparedness is never easy, which is why so many of us get caught out when something goes wrong. With technology, the tiniest thing can misfire and blast your plans to oblivion.

I was happy to come across blogger Rob Jackson’s post Confessions of a Live Blog Failure, where he talks about trying to report an event on his own, live, and it didn’t go as he expected.

“I was trying to keep up on the content with my keyboard, snap still pics with my digital camera and capture footage with my handycam. CAPTURING it all was too much for one person let alone reporting it back to the all the readers/visitors,” he says.

Best of all, he spells out his mistakes so you can learn. A quick run-down of his recommendations for trying to use social media during an event:

• Get a back-up Internet connection, in case the local connection fails
• Bring back-up battery and cables
• Test the system

I feel for the guy, but I’m glad he decided to share his tragic experience for the greater good.

In the giving spirit of the season, our Friendly Web Tools blog is going to close out the year with a wealth of tips for you. From now until 2009 (we’re taking a break on the 25th and 26th), we’re going to give you our top five every day, from design tips to gadgets.

Today, as it’s Gadget Monday, I’m giving you our top five gadgets. As with all gadgets featured on Gadget Monday, these meet our criteria of affordability, ease of use, practicality and ingenuity, all factors we think are vital for charitable organizations.

So, with the end of the year nigh, our top five gadgets:

1. XO. We adore the cheap, durable, energy efficient and inspired green and white laptop computer from the One Laptop Per Child project. We love it because it’s wonderfully designed and it can help change the life of children all around the world. It’s cute, rugged and has built-in wireless. In fact, it’s so great, you might want to buy one for a kid somewhere else who needs one and then buy one for a kid closer to home.

2. E-book reader. It’s a weird experience going from a book to a digital square, but once you cotton on to an e-book reader, you’ll never look back. Even if you don’t want to pay for the expensive books, you’ll still love either the Sony E-Book Reader or Amazon’s Kindle for free and paperless newspapers, magazines and a large backlog of public domain books.

3. Solio Charger. We first saw this when we volunteered at our local public radio station – they were giving it away as a premium for pledging. I’ve loved it ever since. The Solio “stores power from the sun or socket; freeing you to recharge your mobile phone, iPod and other handheld devices anywhere, anytime. A fully charged Solio will recharge the average phone up to two times, or give you up to 15 hours of MP3 music.” Green and great.

4. Zi6. We’ve reviewed the Flip Video digital recorder, but we really like Kodak’s Zi6. It’s a cheap HD (I’ve seen it for barely over $100 online) camcorder for quickly capturing video and letting you upload it to YouTube easily. Fast and fun.

5. Optoma’s Pico Projector. Earlier this year, we featured the 3M pocket projector, a gadget that makes taking PowerPoint or video presentations on the road much easier. We also like Optoma’s Pico, which is bright, incredibly portable and just shy of $400.

This week kicks off a special presidential edition of Talance’s Friendly Web Tools Blog, celebrating the first time in eight years that the White House has participated in the technological revolution that’s been exploding everywhere else on the planet. We love how the President-elect has used technology to reach so many people, raise so many funds and create a powerful, galvanizing campaign. They’re all techniques that people at nonprofits should be studying and copying whenever possible – no matter who you voted for.

If you love gadgets, you’ll have to love how many Barack Obama has. To wit:

• He’s a BlackBerry addict – did you see him giving speeches with it clipped to his belt?
• He uses a Mac notebook
• Michelle Obama said he wouldn’t leave home without his webcam to stay connected with his family
• He uses a Zune at the gym (or at least did one time)
• He plans to have a laptop on his desk in the Oval Office. This makes him the first president to have Internet access in the famous room. Sadly, however, he may have to give up e-mail, because they can be hacked into and subpoenaed.

Move over pens, it’s time to make room for a pocket projector. Yes, projector, not protector. The 3M Pocket Projector is a dinky $359 projector that takes the place of hyper-expensive LCD projectors that can run in the thousands.

Plug the projector into your laptop to access DVDs, presentations and photos, and project them onto your desk or wall or another blank white space. It’s definitely limited to a smaller room application in bright light – it displays around a foot across – but in a dark room, you can use it to project a much larger image on the wall.

Perfect tool for taking on the road for seminars or doing quick displays.

I like my keyboard, but it does have its drawbacks. It’s incredibly long, snaking down my desk with extra keypads and features and loads of shortcut buttons that I rarely, if ever, use.

That’s why Brando’s little keyboard, called the USB 2.4Ghz RF Wireless Multimedia Tiny Keyboard, is so appealing. It’s called “tiny,” and small it is, but still suitable for casual typing. It easily lays in your two cupped hands and can be pulled all around the room because it has no cords to restrict it. No wires to get tangled in your coffee cup.

It might not be the best tool for writing a full novel, but it’s small, portable and handy for taking in and out of meetings or workshops and costs less than $50.

My partner spotted one of these at the jQuery conference in Boston on Sunday. It’s a cheap ($249.99 on Newegg.com) and adequately powered (2GB) tiny (2 lbs, 7″) laptop. It’s the perfect little buddy to take with you to conferences, off-site meetings or other events.

It’s also got a solid-state disk, which means you can knock it around relatively worry-free, since nothing is going to come loose inside. It’s also got a built-in WiFi that that the manufactures claim “automatically detects and connects to the Internet at any hotspot.”

It runs Linux rather than Windows, which keeps it fast and cheap. But the downside is that you won’t have a copy of your Outlook for mail or other Windows programs you’re addicted to. Some report that it doesn’t handle video well, although the manufacturers tout sharing videos on YouTube and Flickr. It also comes pre-loaded with Skype, one of my favorite programs for the nonprofit.

The thing about weblogs is that they’re supposed to be quick and easy to put together. A theory that’s compounded by the number of people who “blog” live events. That’s to say they attend an event and bring their computer with them and provide nearly real-time feedback on what they’re seeing.

That’s of course the idea, but it takes much more work than that to actually crank up the blogging machine. That’s why I liked this posting by WebWorkerDaily about what one contributor takes with her to do live blogging. Her list of hardware includes:

• Computer
• Good, capacious computer bag
• Flip video camera (I’ve mentioned this before on my own weblog)
• Digital recorder

The software, well, that’s another big list altogether, and fodder for a future post.

A pen, you may say, is by default wireless. That’s why it’s called a pen and not a keyboard. But the Mobile Digital Scribe GPEN200N from Iogear looks like a pen but is effectively a portable computer.

This device captures 50 pages of your handwriting or drawings – using normal ink – and it transfers them to your computer as a digital document. You can sign checks with this thing, but it has enough digital juice to grab a whole day’s worth of meeting notes. When you’re done jotting, upload to any computer you want – without need of a digital notepad or special paper. The handwriting recognition software (OCR software) converts your notes into digital text.

This has a real benefit for anyone giving a presentation, because you can connect the pen to a digital projector to show your writing in near real time. Forget overhead projectors.

Pretty cheap too. You can buy it for $129 from the manufacturer or pick it up for less than $100 online.

Here’s a gadget that anyone who works with the visually impaired will love: karaoke in Braille.

It’s from a Japanese company called Nippon Telesoft, actually two companies that have teamed up to build the special machine. A PC plugged into the karaoke machine translates lyrics into Braille and sends them to a special display. The characters appear on the display slightly ahead of the music so singers can follow along in time with the tunes.

Now it’s not just your sighted friends who can get drunk and sing off-key to old Genesis songs.

See the machine in action.