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Kindle/Nook ‘smackdown’ from Jim Fallows of the Atlantic
November 1, 2009 | 1:15 am
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By David Rothman
Looking for an “exhaustive” Kindle/Nook comparison? Jim Fallows of The Atlantic served up some thoughts last week. He passes on opinions from a B&N-related source, then shares his own analysis.
Excerpt: “Nook and Kindle aren’t grossly different cost-wise. So for me, the only reason to switch to the Nook (or if I were a virgin ereader, to buy the Nook rather than the Kindle) is if I thought I’d get a wider selection of the sorts of books I’m likely to buy for my Kindle at a better price from B&N than from Amazon.”
Jim wonders if Amazon will imitate B&N’s friend-lend arrangement. What do you think? He also says Amazon focused too much on the Kindle for its own books and not enough on it as a general-purpose e-reader. Amen to that!
Related: All-in-one post on all-in-one devices, another Fallows post. He himself is sold for now—with the current tech—on the use of dedicated readers.
About the Kindle photo: Yes, that’s a DX instead of the Kindle 2 Jim compares with the Nook. The DX is more expensive than the 2 or the Nook.
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Comments:
With no Nook yet available, I downloaded and installed the Barnes & Noble ereader program for PC Windows (name approximate) and set up a credit card account that allowed me to buy the same books as for the Nook. The only difference was that the reading would be done on a Windows PC, desktop, laptop, handheld, whatever, and the internet would serve as the communications medium instead of the AT&T 3G network.
This worked out pretty well, with a lot of display flexibility : fonts and font sizes, selectable colors, margins, bookmarks, etc. It’s hard to go back to black and white from white letters on blue or yellow letters on
black.
The problems seen to this point are as follows :
1. You can turn autoscroll ON and turn it OFF, but that leaves you back at the beginning, where you turned it ON.
2. If you configure the program to automatically check at program startup at B&N for new purchases for download and your internet is either turned off or not functioning, then it gives you a big error message and resets most of your preferences and settings. Annoying.
While I have memorized my 9 digit social security number, I have not memorized any of my 16 digit credit card numbers, and making this an entry requirement for any previously purchased encrypted download is a form of torture. It’s hard enough to read the raised numbers on a credit card after I go scrounge it up, but hiding the 16 digit entry as stars gives no accuracy feedback. What would the problem with a user password have been?
So, after all of the above, I needed to find a book to buy to test the program. This was made slightly more difficult by the fact that reading on a PC is less enjoyable than on my Kindle DX, but for testing, that’s OK. So browsing the B&N site for something to buy was surprisingly difficult. I finally settled on a detective crime fiction ebook for $4.99, but even that was available on Amazon for $3.99.
Preliminary conclusion?
Trying to find an ebook from B&N that I want to read that Amazon doesn’t also have for the same price or less is like looking for a non-magnetic pin in a haystack.
Regards, Don
I agree with his (and some of his readers’) conclusion that there is no technical or functional reason to buy one or the other. The compelling reasons were the purely social, or economic, reasons.
I actually found the comments on convergence more interesting. I look at it similarly to the comments from the camera poster. The key element of a good camera is not the sensor; it’s the lens. I have a decade old Canon consumer level camera with a third the pixels of a newer HP camera. The Canon was (at the time) renowned for its excellent lens. It still takes better pictures. It isn’t style, in this case, it’s physics. My cell phone camera is the best camera I have on me all the time. It takes a mediocre picture _at the decisive moment_. That’s been the criterion since Cartier-Bresson.
With respect to other devices converging, I suspect there is a similar tension between “excellent” and “good enough”. Dedicated ereaders (or another big screen device) may be like the big lens on my wife’s Canon XTI. For some jobs, nothing else will do. Time and history will determine if a single converged device with access to local resources (like a large TV screen), or several specialized devices that interoperate with a converged device will win out.
As for now, I read ebooks on one of several PCs, my smartphone, an old Dell PDA, and a jetBook. A tool for every task. Interestingly, all of those tools access books I keep on a single SD card. Maybe that’s the converged device.
Regards,
Jack Tingle
A coupld of things, in all due respect.
1. James Fallows is a top notch thinker and writer, I love all of his work. but nook is lowercased, look at the cover, look at the BN website…… just like e.e.cummings sometimes spelled his name that way, BN made a concious decision to name and spell the nook as the nook. not the Nook. we should all be aware of this. Just as Yahoo! comes with an ! mark after the word!
2. When I asked Jim a few months ago what he thought of my silly idea to maybe cast around for a new word for reading on screens, in order to differ it from reading on paper, and what he thought of my intial idea of “screening….” — he said NO NEED, and explained it this way:
“….This is interesting, but FWIW I’m not likely to be an early adopter of “screening.” Two reasons:
- There is already and established AND DIFFERENT meaning of “screening” that could easily be confused here. The meaning I have in mind is similar to
“skimming,” “reviewing,” “categorizing” etc — going through material quickly to assess its importance, as opposed to fully concentrating on and absorbing it.
– The existing meaning of “reading” has been independent of the medium on which the words are displayed. We’ve used the term to apply to words printed on paper; subtitles on a movie screen; words flashed on neon signs; etc. In all the cases, regardless of medium, we use “read” to refer to the act of
taking in written symbols by eye and converting them mentally to words.
So, good luck with this — I am not opposed to it, but this is why I’ll stick with “reading” myself.
– Jim F.
How “well-informed” could the “reader” he consulted be, if the reader did not know that Google Books are available via the B&N bookstore, and presumably thus available for download on the nook? Anyone who tried the B&N PC client would know that.
The OCR concerns of Google Books, however, are noted, as they should be.
Thanks for the initial post–very informative, as well as the comments, which each provided more information as well. There are so many options for reading available to us now! I’m particularly interested in how people with low vision are finding both devises to work. Any feedback on that?
Thanks again.