For Christmas this year, my wife got me a Barnes & Noble nook, and I LOVE it.
When I first thought about writing this review, I figured I would include pictures of the nook and its accessories… then I thought that really didn’t make much sense. You can see pictures of it all over the place. It’s not like mine would be any better. What is really important is how it works and how it feels.
My parents are/were both big readers so I have been surrounded by books ever since birth; therefore, I am a reader and have a wall of our office devoted to books. I love browsing around bookstores and finding the hidden treasures of a new author and then kicking back with a good book and a cup of coffee. When I first thought about eBook a few years back, I thought that it wouldn’t really catch on. The eBook readers were PDAs, computers and the odd reader here and there… not very attractive to a devoted reader. Then more recently the Kindle came on the scene and that really put a serious line in the sand for books and readers. Now there was a bit bookseller with a quality eBook reader which was a strong combination. I looked into the Kindle (my Mom actually has had one for quite a while) and found it lacking in some areas, notably the way they handle DRM… so I held onto my books and waited.
Enter the nook (for some reason capitalization has gone out of style). I never really heard many rumors about it until just before it was announced…. and then it was love. The nook has a sensible DRM policy (you can store and backup your books locally while also maintaining a copy on BN’s server), it has the same eInk display as the Kindle, with an additional full color touch screen (for navigation, typing, coverflow, etc), and it’s got full support for PDFs (which the Kindle now has too). A few other niceties are that it has a self-replaceable battery, and a microSD slot for adding more memory. It’s about the same width and height as the Kindle though its a bit thicker and heavier, but not overly so.
The reading experience of the nook is great. The page buttons are on either side of the unit at just the right location for easy access, without being easy to accidentally press. The screen is almost like reading a book page, with the light gray background and nice clean text. One odd thing my mother and I both commented on about both the nook and the Kindle is the lack of some sort of built-in back light; the eInk display does not produce light so you can’t read in the dark without and external light source. There are plenty of book-lights out there so it’s not that big a deal.
One nice bonus about the nook is that it’s based on the Android, which means that they have a good solid platform to develop on and that we may see some additional applications for the nook or even an open SDK for developers to write their own apps. What this also provides is a soon-to-be-released Android phone app for reading your BN eBooks. They already provide a reader for iPhones, Mac and PC.
Purchasing books is simple. You just browse through the online store either on the nook or on your computer and select the book you want. If you are using your nook it will be downloaded right away and you can usually start reading in a minute or two. The nook comes with 3G and Wifi support, though I have not yet set mine up for my home network. The 3G has been fast enough so far.
One thing I recommend is getting a good cover for your nook. I actually bought one of the covers that resembles a book so I still keep things a little bit retro. There are gel covers similar to those you can get for phones and iPods coming out sometime next month.
Lastly, the nook has something the Kindle cannot have… and in-store experience. Supposedly if you take your nook into a Barnes and Noble store you will have free wireless access and the ability to read full copies of any eBook, just like you can when you are in the store looking at normal books. They also said that they will have special nook offers like coupons or free content when you are in the store. I have not yet taking my nook with me so I can’t really comment on that too much.
All in all, I have really enjoyed the nook so far and I am embracing the new digital media revolution… first it was music, then photos, now books. Damn, if I can convert all these books to digital I will have so much extra wall space.
On a side note… something I am hoping will come out of this new rise of the eBooks is that some of the older out of print works will be reborn as eBooks. I would imagine the overhead in digitizing a book is pretty small and then they could start making money on it again.
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