The Barnes & Noble Nook
The Barnes & Noble Nook
I did it. I took the plunge and purchased a eReader. A friend of mine received a Kindle 2 for her birthday (or something) and I looked at it and liked what I saw. I’ve also played a bit with the Sony Reader and enjoyed that experience as well. The problem, I wasn’t sure I wanted a Kindle…and I knew I didn’t want to be locked into the Sony Reader. Knowing that Barnes and Noble was ramping up to release their eReader, as well as talk about an Apple product, I decided to wait. If you know me, the waiting hurt. But I knew I was making the correct decision in waiting.
I finally dove in and bought a Nook. To sum it up…I’m really digging it. I have to admit, I really think this was one of my better technology purchases I’ve made. First there are a few items that led me to the Nook.
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The current debate is e-ink display versus the LCD(-ish) screen. The iPad is touted to revolutionize the eBook experience. With beautifully displayed pages, page turn ability, and the possibility of embedded multimedia inside the book. This all sounds good, but I own a tablet PC and I’ve tried to read a book on the screen. Even after turning the brightness way down, it would hurt my eyes painfully after a short time reading. I’ve already spent multiple hours reading on my Nook and have yet to hurt my eyes. I haven’t tried it out in the sun…no sun in Dallas right now…but reports say it’s awesome. Reading a book needs to be read easily and e-ink displays make that happen.
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Price. This is also a iPad vs. e-Ink style reader. $500+$130 for 3G+$20-$60/month for service is a bit crazy. Even with the Wifi-only version, $500 seems a little steep for big iPod Touch. Large HD (120-250gig HD), with file system access, multitasking, things like that…maybe…but as it stands, cost is the barrier here.
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The little things. Now that the iPad versus eReader was decided, it now really comes down to Kindle vs. Nook. This is where the little things were involved. The Nook experience is head and shoulders above the Kindle’s. The small screen makes for great browsing and more. Running on Android means that this device has the potential to do so much. Replaceable battery, expandable memory, different color back plates, wallpapers and screensavers all make this device pretty tasty.
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Choice. So why does the Nook give me more choice than the Kindle. Sure the Nook is tied to the B&N bookstore, but it’s also open to the epub format (which is almost the defacto ebook format) and supports PDF. Sure the Kindle can read PDFs now, but as far as I know, the Nook can use Adobe Digital Edition "DRM" where Kindle cannot. Why is Digital Editions important? Most library’s use the Overdrive service which utilizes this. So with this capability, the Nook can read books from B&N, Kobo Books, eReader Bookstore, Fictionwise, BooksonBoard, etc. So where as with the Kindle you are almost completely tied to Amazon for legal book purchases, the Nook allows you to shop around to find the best deal. Awesome.
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Possibilities. At the time of purchase, this was a big swing toward the Nook. There’s a nice group of developers that have rooted the Nook and are building homebrew applications. Huge possibilities. But with the recent release of a Kindle SDK, this means the Kindle could have some pretty substantial gains here as well.
So I’ve heard of people that claimed problems with the Nook and so they switched to the Kindle, but I have yet to have any of those issues. It’s been smooth sailing…very smooth sailing since the purchase and I have recently seen an update pushed to my device. The first thing I did was browse the interface then check on book purchasing. The first book I bought was A Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin. The price was $1.90 (I know good price, huh?), the purchase went smoothly and within minutes it was on my Nook ready to read. That’s where I hit my first hitch. So I checked my credit card bill to see the purchase, and it wasn’t $1.90…that’s when it hit me. B&N have retail stores in almost every state. This means even online purchases are subject to the sales tax of that state. Something I wasn’t prepared for, but that was my fault. Keep this in mind, but there are often 10% off coupons that can compensate for the taxes.
The reading experience is great. I spent the time to prepare the font and the size to suit my reading pleasure. I took a few moments to load a few PDFs that I have by utilizing Calibre. These books look flawless. I also found that just loading the PDF reads much better than having Calibre convert it to an ePub book. Calibre tends to keep the width of the original PDF intact which means there’s line breaks at every line. A Microsoft LIT file, which I had purchased for reading on my tablet, converted beautifully and loaded well. Loading the PDF with Calibre also does well by adding book cover art for you, better than just copying because it interacts with the interface better.
Now on to customizing. This was an awesome piece to the Nook. There are two items that deal with pictures you can play with. There’s the wallpaper, which is the image that shows on the e-ink display when you are at the home screen. And there’s the screensaver, which is a package of images are cycled though while the Nook is in standby. The default screensaver is a bunch of pictures of dead authors…boring. But I love cityscapes and there was a pre-loaded set of city images…I was good to go! Now for the wallpaper, hmm. I finally settled on a nice image of a test pattern that says: "Please Stand By". Found a nice image saying "Don’t Panic" but I figured that was a bit too cliche.
I also purchased a cover for my Nook…which by the way I named "Winston". The initial setup asks you to name your Nook. So Winston got some clothes, I chose a beautiful leather cover in Earth. I wanted this one, but didn’t like the idea of it being released in April…COME ON!! I’ve also learned the art of swiping your finger to turn the page (instead of the buttons), and its nice. It turns much like flicking a page of a book…sort of like the iPad…hmmm…. Watch how with this short Video
Ok, so has it been all rainbows and unicorns? Not really. There are a few features I’d like to request get implemented. The best part about these requests? They are all software related…easily fixable. These are definitely not deal breakers, but of course, they are little annoyances that would be prudent for B&N to fix.
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The Daily is weak. The Daily is a list of select articles that show up nearly every day to read on your Nook. These articles are curated tightly (only around 3-4 a day), and this is B&N’s biggest mistake. B&N should allow you to add RSS feeds to your account that can then be sent to the device. I can only imagine hooking up Instapaper and getting the list of articles that I don’t have time to read at work or other places and read them on my Nook. You can sync the Nook with Calibre (for RSS feeds), but that takes time and effort on my part. Automatically updating my device would be amazing. I know that you are leaching AT&T 3G wireless so they wouldn’t want you to send your entire Google Reader list to the Nook, but they could limit it to 3-5 feeds. Honestly, this would be enough. It’s not replacing your feed reader, it’s a place for the feeds in which you’ll read 100% or in the case of Instapaper, a place to read those articles you don’t instantly have time to read but want to later. This appears to be really simple. B&N…please get this going! Please!
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Audiobooks don’t play very well. I have quite a few MP3 audiobooks. They sound fine, but most audiobooks are read nightmarishly slowly. A way to speed up the reading ~25%, like you can on the iPod, would be really nice. Secondly, I found that the Nook often forgot the position I was at for an audiobook. At times, it would just restart from the beginning…which makes using the touchscreen to find your place very difficult on a 6-8 hour MP3. Sometimes while reading an article while listening to the audiobook, the simple act of turning the page caused the book to restart. I could replicate this multiple times and it needs some work. Not a game changer, but annoying none the less. These eReaders are pushing to be the “one-stop-shop” for all things literary related, so these audiobook trials should be corrected.
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The Lookup feature is difficult. When you want to lookup a word, you select the feature and it highlights the first word on the page. Then you use a four-directional pad to move the highlight to the word you want to look up. Sound easy? Well no, there is a delay between movement and e-ink updating so it’s not very fast. Then, if you have to look up a word at the end of the page, it takes forever to get to that word. Then on top of that, the dictionary doesn’t work well with the different tenses and pluralities. So you often, after frustratingly moving to the word you want to lookup, get a "Word Not Found" error. I’m not sure why B&N didn’t feel the better way to do this is to type it out on the virtual keyboard, there’s no worry about misspelling the word because it is on the page right in front of you. Also, this would turn the Nook into a true portable dictionary. The next thing would be to have the ability to buy better dictionaries and be able to use it. The on board, Oxford Collegiate Dictionary isn’t bad, but there are better ones, as well as having the capabilities of loading a non-English dictionary for our foreign friends.
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Tawcan
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traeblain
