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My Nook tryout at the local B&N: A sluggish e-reader with confusing navigation
December 9, 2009 | 5:20 am
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By Jean Kaplansky
Welcome to TeleRead’s newest contributor, Jean Kaplansky. She’s an XML pro and violin-lover who lives in upstate New York with her husband, three dogs and five cats. “I’ve been doing the e-book thing,” Jeans writes, “since the emergence of Peanut Reader for the Palm way back in the ‘90s.” Why not visit a nearby B&N and share your experiences? Will successful software updates be enough to win you over? Or is this one DOA? – D.R.
I’ve had my hands on the Nook, and I was disappointed in what almost all the reviewers seem to be disappointed in. But first some positives.
The Nook offers battery access, its only unique feature. Also, it’s pretty, and comfy in the hands—the back is curved with some nice ergonomics. Once I got to an e-book, the Nook’s quality matched my Sony 300 in terms of resolution for text, and the page turn lag was as expected. The Nook offers no bold, but three different fonts that are easy on the eyes, including Helvetica.
The many negatives: Slow, with confusing navigation
The Nook is slow, however, and the navigation is hard to figure out. Compared to the Nook, the iPhone’s navigation wins hands down.
Even more confusing is doing the swipe thing on the capacitive touch pad to navigate the screen. While I knew that the E Ink screen was not a touch screen, my intuition kept telling me that was where I needed to swipe to navigate the lists up there. At first I thought this was a holdover habit because I own a Sony 700, but then one of the B & N associates told me that he, too, wanted to swipe on the Nook screen. In addition, there are some registration issues with the touch screen. It’s not always responsive.
The Nook also re-formats whatever you’re reading every time you access the file, even if you’ve opened it before. My husband made a big show of twiddling his thumbs while two B & N employees and I waited for the Nook to format the latest Charlaine Harris novel.
SLAMMED servers
Here’s what will nail B&N in the short term, beyond speed and navigation issues. The Nook servers are SLAMMED… as in, I couldn’t download anything to the Nook despite the 3G connection because everyone in the country was trying to download something from the B&N servers to the demo Nooks. This was at 5:30 p.m.
The employee training issue
While the B&N employees were very interested in my feedback, they didn’t quite grasp that my feedback had already been expressed in multiple places online. Further, they were fairly confused about the difference between 3G, Wi-Fi, and the speed of the user interface. I don’t expect booksellers to be computer experts, but B&N should have been provided at least enough training for the employees to be able to understand that the speed of UI navigation doesn’t have anything to do with the server connection if you’re not navigating stuff actually up on the server (be it 3G or Wi-Fi).
I’m glad I didn’t pre-order. Disappointed, but glad. If the Sony Daily Edition or the mythical Apple Tablet can’t top this, then I’ll just stick with my Sony 300 and iPhone ’til things have had a chance to mature.
Being a gadget hound isn’t all that fun if the gadgets don’t behave to function…
Another editor’s note: These are Jean’s personal views and not those of her employer. – D.R.
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Comments:
Interesting. Amazon had some problems early on, with their customer service reps not understanding the Kindle 6-device sharing limits. A service rep mistakenly told a customer that he could only download each book a specified number of times, which is false; that customer was a blogger and of course the bad info spread across the web like a wildfire.
I guess the publishers aren’t the only one struggling with the new paradigms of digital publishing.
Thanks for posting. It was good to see a hands-on, in-store review.
I recently got some hands-on with a demo at my local B&N. While Nook was slow & buggy, after playing with it for a while I can see Nook having great potential. Most of the problems are software issues, which can be corrected with firmware updates.
One small, but impressive feature I noticed with Nook is that turning pages is very smooth. The screen doesn’t flash off then back on, as with other ebook readers.
B&N’s biggest mistake was rushing Nook on the market too soon and too fast. If they would have spent more time working all these issues out beforehand and ensuring proper stock levels to meet demand, Nook could have made its debut with much more positive feedback.
I agree with you and offer my own review with some more specifics——————-
Well I went to my local B&N today to get an up-close and personal with the new nook. They had two demo models and I was also lucky enough to get about 30 minutes with the demo guy and the nooks. I immediately told him that I wanted to compare it side-by-side with my Kindle 2 and he had no problem with that. I am sure that many will think that because I am a ‘Kindler’, that I’m being too harsh and critical, but I can only compare the experience when using the nook to my current Kindle experience and I hope that some of my criticism of the device can and will be addressed by software updates. I’d like to see the nook as real competition for the Kindle – so far, its announcement alone seems to have forced Amazon to address some of the needed improvements in the Kindle–that’s a good thing.
I’ll try to address only things that make up any major differences in using the devices. All things being equal, there is access to most of the same books with Amazon edging out ahead on pricing, but with nook offering some library books, nooks lending feature comparable to the Kindle text-to-speech feature as well as Amazon’s wireless but pay-per-item email feature vs. nook’s in-store sample readability and wifi offerings. Users’ mileage and options will vary on the usefulness of any of those features.
I would have had the nook as the real winner in the competition because of the LCD screen but, well you can read on to see why not…
My first negative was that one of the in-store display units required two resets and we still couldn’t get it to work, and had to move to the second. That doesn’t seem to bode well for users getting shipped right now, most reviewers admit that a software update is needed and I have heard other reports of demo units not working as well. Hopefully, these bad units were from initial stock known to have a few issues so were sent to stores rather than customers.
(Update: I forgot to mention two things on the nook that are a big plus. Their book navigation notes both a book ‘location’ and a PAGE NUMBER! This is uber-awesome for book clubs, students and workplace use. Even though I got a few silent blinks when I asked whether the page numbers were for the hard or paper-back versions, any reference to actual page numbers is nice. The second thing is that B&N sprang for an upgraded .PDF model than the Kindle. Per the B&N employee, the .PDF is text searchable. I’d like confirmation of that.)
In-book
The screen contrast seems a bit better than on the Kindle 2. The gray background doesn’t seem as gray so that makes the text seem clearer. There are also options to change the font that are not available on the Kindle without a hack and users can add their own screensavers which again are not available on the Kindle.
IMO, B&N did themselves a bit of disservice when they designed the navigation in terms of an eReader. You have to go through too many touches of the screen to get to a book, navigate thru books, get definitions and other things. Keep in mind that I am coming from a Kindle interface where I can open any one of the 10 books on my home page with one click, use my thumb to highlight as well as get any definitions. I imagine that traversing through the menus and options may not be as distracting when shopping as a user expects more interaction in that scenario. But up front, there are too many screens with too many options just to open one of the books in your list.
Opening and going through a book side by side with the Kindle, the screen refresh of the nook is markedly slower in the page refresh–markedly. I did not see any of the LCD lag mentioned in other reviews, but the eInk refresh definitely needs some work. Every time a book is opened, it looks like the nook updates the ‘flow’, and turning a page was also slow. I estimate about twice as long on the page refresh and 3 to 4 times as long to open a book and sync the main display to the LCD .
The dictionary and notes and highlight features of the nook also require interaction with the touch screen. To illustrate the different, in the same time it took the B&N guy to open a book and go to the 1st page, I had a book open, had gone to the next page and gotten a definition. I used one hand, he had to use two.
In short, as far as navigation and menus, the nook really needs the assistance of a usability expert to trim down the menu selections and options to something WAY more workable.
Shopping
I liked the shopping experience of the nook better than the Kindle store experience as pricing showed up in the book list and the screens shown seemed really clean as far a the options for browsing. Being able to browse books on a device doesn’t sound like much, but it added to something that I was missing with my Kindle–that in-store feel. I really like a good bookstore.
Also having the price right up front within the list was a nice feature. I got an in-store advertisement in a box on the screen right in the middle of browsing books that I would find distracting if were to repeat, but maybe they pick stuff based upon what you’re browsing. I don’t know as that box only showed up once. They need to add a feature that shows you customized recommendations though. I was told that the ‘Recommended’ book list would not be customized to either my browsing or past purchase history. I find that hard to believe, but since the device was not registered to me, I could not verify that.
I almost had a cow when one of the books available on the nook was Stephen King’s Under the Dome, but I was later told that it was a sample. It was a big sample, though as I saw a Chapter 8 on the list. Most Kindle samples are only the 1st two chapters. I didn’t think to ask if that was because I was inside the store, but for nookites, I hope not. A big sample would be great because I have purchased Kindle books based upon the 1st two chapters only to regret it because it was all downhill from there.
Overall
I found the nook to be noticeably heavier in my hand. Since I didn’t have hours of reading time, I’m not sure if that would be any factor to the reading experience, but we’ll see how that shakes out with daily use.
I really did not get any value from the addition of the LCD screen. There were just too many menus for what is in essence a single purposed device. The nook is for reading books. Period, end of sentence and for me, the experience was not enhanced in any way by the LCD it and in fact, was a distraction at best. Perhaps if B&N opens that area up to development, it may really turn into something, but for now it gets a shrug.
I was really surprised that there is no content management. The demo unit only had 10 books on it, but in contrast, I have 108 items on my Kindle. One of my first questions was how to navigate thru the nook if I had a similar number of items and was told to search, but that wasn’t what I was looking for. If I was searching, I would probably be looking for more of what I call a ‘browse’ search, not a I’m looking for a single specific item search. I would probably be looking for a choice of various genres, authors or perhaps a series. B&N missed what to me is a big Kindle complaint by not jumping on the ability to organize your books with more options than the Kindle offers.
I don’t think this is the ‘Kindle-killer’ that B&N was looking for, but even though I will remain a dedicated Kindler for now, the nook is definitely a viable option.
OK – not the brightest gadget wiz in the world, but please tell me why I can download ebooks into my library on my computer but I cannot get them on my nook. Any help would be appreciated.