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B&N’s $259 Nook: Friend-lend, sync between devices, WiFi AND 3G, Android operating system, ePub, PDF capabilities
October 20, 2009 | 1:38 pm
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By David Rothman
Update: See Paul’s report from the news conference.
B&N’s $259 Nook e-reader will let you lend books to friends, sync the last-read pages with other devices, and offer WiFi and 3G wireless capabilities. That’s according to info available from the B&N site today.
Other features: Six-inch E Ink screen, 3.5 inch color touch screen, direct PDF-reading.
Key links: Feature comparison vs. Kindle. Also see other feature info and ordering page from B&N. Plus tech specs, accessory list and B&N e-book blog, as well as support information.
Other features: 6 inch E Ink screen, 3.5 inch color touch screen, direct PDF-reading.
Format info and other details picked up by Felix: “Pdf, epub, pdb, Not clear which pdb flavor or which format has drm. MicroSDHC support is good, wifi is good. Lots of bragging about the google crapscan, though. Will be interesting to see if it supports Android apps.” Decent Web browsing possible, if so?
More to come: Paul Biba will be at the 4 p.m. news conference.
Your reactions—and mine: Thoughts? In my opinion, the Nook is about what we expected, more or less, no? The WiFi capability will be nice. But I’m sorry not to see text-to-speech.So far, however, as of this 3:39 p.m. update, Twitter reaction seems favorable.
Related: Wall Street Journal article from this afternoon, Google News and Techmeme roundups.
(Via Reading 2.0 and Amgela James.)
Technorati Tags: Nook
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Comments:
Formats:
Pdf, epub, pdb
Not clear which pdb flavor or which format has drm.
MicroSDHC support is good, wifi is good.
Lots of bragging about the google crapscan, tnough.
Will be interesting to see if it supports Android apps.
If it does, it might be worth it just to use as a webpad.
They may be aimjng at Amazon but they look to have scored a direct hit at Sony.
OMG I think I just drooled into my shooes!
Curious to see how flexible the PDF support will be; hopefully zooming will be possible unlike on the Kindle DX. And hopefully there’ll be a better way to scan through 17,500 books than through their covers. Otherwise I’m impressed and interested if it can be accessed via calibre.
Whoa – elending? Now that I could get in to.
Felix, the B & N site says it has an Android OS – so I’d imagine that Android apps can be run on it …? But I’m way over my head on tech specifics.
The ANDROID OS is a good start but that’s all it is; a start. It is an enabler but it is not necessarily sufficient for open app development. ANDROID is a Unix descendant and UNIXes in all their flavors are “onions”; layer upon layer of software. Kernel. drivers, environment libraries, etc.
With embedded systems you need more that just what ships in the gadget to write apps. Somebody (and it doesn’t have to be B&N) has to provide the enabling libraries and development tools.
Given that Android is “hot” and about to get hotter (keep an eye on the iDon’t Droid campaign), B&N’s timing is good; I expect the first few hundred Nooks are going to be scarfed up by hackers looking to explore the hardware and see how much they can squeeze from it. In the best of all worlds, B&N would be offering up a Software Development Kit and establishing a certification program and maybe even an app store. In the worst of all worlds they would have implemented a proprietary app-signing algorithm that would prevent execution of third party apps.
Reality will likely lie somewhere in between…
C|Net has a nice slideshow of the nook.
Right upfront, I have an issue; the secondary screen doesn’t seem to black out. A distraction as well as a power leach…
C|Net slideshow link: (oops!)http://reviews.cnet.com/2300-3508_7-10001734-1.html?tag=newsLeadStoriesArea.1
Meaningful data trickling in.
1- WiFi is in-store only.
2- No browser. Don’t sound hostile to third party apps.
3- Book-lending is 14 days to any B&N reader plaform, can be blocked at publisher’s discretion so, just like Kindle’s TTS, it is *not* universal.
4- Anybody want to lay odds on the NYT bestsellers being lend-able?
Looks nice from a distance. Amazon can’t be too happy about all those “x”-es on that feature comparison chart.
Can anyone tell if Nook will read the ebooks aloud?
The tech specs state that it plays audio books, as in official audio books. But will it read any ebook — any EPUB file or PDF file — that appears on the screen?
If yes, then they’ve just sold a Nook to a former ebook reading device skeptic and curmudgeon.
Michael Pastore
50 Benefits of Ebooks
No TTS is provided.
Where’s the keyboard????
Does the color display switch to a keyboard?
Thank you, Felix. (about TTS).
About book lending:
Nook is now set up so that you can lend one title only one time. After that loan, you may never again lend that particular ebook.