As I was in the mall this afternoon, walking back to my bicycle to catch the bus, I happened to spy a woman sitting on the bench in a children’s play enclosure, reading a Nook. Since this was the first Nook I had seen “in the wild,” I stopped and spoke to the lady about it.
I showed her my iPad, and she said she’d chosen an e-ink reader because for some reason she had trouble using touch-sensitive screens—even the one on the Nook gave her trouble sometime—and backlit screens gave her headaches.
I asked her why the Nook and not the Kindle, and she said that it came down to two factors: the expandable storage through the Nook’s SD card slot, and the ability to browse and read freebies online in Barnes & Noble stores.
It was interesting to talk to an ordinary person who reads e-books about the reasons for her choices. I wonder how many more of these devices I will begin seeing around me?
I have a friend with a Kindle and another one just got a Nook. The nook came with a nice leather cover that makes it look like a real book, which, for some reason, really appeals to me. Strange, because I usually base my preferences on specs. Both my friends are non-techies, so it’s exciting to see the direction in which things are finally moving ebookwise.
BTW, I love the preview you get on the Kindle and find the preview on the B&N laughable at times. Really, I don’t need to see the dedication or ISBN over, say, the first page.
This comment was submitted from a nook. It was’nt easy. The nook browser doesn’t live in the world of 2010. Next time I’ll use my Mac.
Believe me, the nook is a great beach reader device, as is the Kindle. It’s great for those who get headaches, but I don’t. I’ve about 300 books on my nook right now, many of them the free books which are easy to “buy” on the B&N website. David Rothman has told me to sell it and buy an iPad. However, I have trouble parting with devices that I’ve added to my computer museum that goes back to an Apple II from 1980. I still own a Rocket Ebook – which I bought from Barnes and Noble about ten years ago.
The nook has it’s place in the world of e-reading and has some quirky features (the in store free books) which obviously is trying to persuade those of us who use digital paper back into the p-book stores.
And believe me, I’ll never try to make another comment on Teleread using my nook – I just thought it might be an interesting experiment.
Don, I can see the nook and Kindle as beach machines, not to mention the B&N deals; but, yes, there is otherwise some redundancy. The e-book museum rationale will also do, of course. Nostalgia, present and future, is fine. I myself just felt I had better uses for the almost $400 that I got from the sale of my Sony and Kindle. Enjoy ALL your machines, and keep us up to date on your nook experiences!
Thanks
David
For me the big decision to go with NOOK—I’m an Amazon Prime customer—came down to: NOOK supports Adobe EPUB.
I can buy e-books almost anywhere except Amazon. I can check e-books out of the library. My Adobe EPUB e-books are readable on most e-readers; I’m not stuck with NOOK if I decide to change in the future.
Amazon has built a “Berlin Wall” around the Kindle. If you have a Kindle and want to buy a DRMed e-book (all of the big publishers insist on DRM), you have no choice but to buy it from Amazon—ask the Kindle owners who can’t buy recent Penguin releases. And the DRMed e-books that you buy can only be used on a Kindle or a Kindle app; if you dare to consider switching away from Amazon, you’d find that your library of DRMed e-books would become unreadable. Amazon pwns its Kindle customers.
There are other reasons, but that was the biggie. I’ve gotten e-books from a number of vendors, including Sony and Kobo, for my NOOK.
I was torn on this one as well. I decided to buy a Kindle based on the ability to have at least rudimentary web access without having to find a wi-fi hotspot. Now that my wife has pretty much taken over the Kindle, I might buy a Nook for my own machine.
Of course, having the machines does help with my testing process although Kindle/eReader for PC does a pretty good job at that.
Rob Preece
Publisher
I’m a Nook owner also. I bought the Nook for several reasons:
I had previously purchased over 1000 titles in eReader format at Fictionwise (loved those sales and the 5% additional discount, although I haven’t bought much there since April 1, beginning to wonder if they’ll ever have the Agency 5 again).
I didn’t want to be forced into buying everything with DRM (i.e, the big 6 publishers) at Amazon. The retailers and the publishers like to play games with each other at our expense, and I don’t want to be tied to a single retailer (e.g., Amazon & Penguin, Fictionwise & Overdrive & Agency 5).
I wanted a reader with an expansion card. I have too many ebooks to fit in the standard 2 GB on the Nook and Kindle 2, and my 8 GB expansion card is about 1/3 full now.
I think the Nook touchscreen is nicer than the Kindle keyboard, although I will admit that it’s probably harder to type quickly. I’m not sure if that’s the keyboard’s fault or the eInk refresh though.
I like the Nook cafe coupons. 😉
You can actually play with a Nook before buying it without having to know another owner. Amazon is starting to sell the Kindle in a few Target stores, but it will probably Christmas selling season before it goes nationwide.
Amazon Kindle commercials are lame. My coworker with a Kindle didn’t even realize they were Kindle commercials until I told her. The Nook commercial does a much better job of branding and showing the Nook in action. I didn’t really base my decision on this, I already had my Nook before the B&N commercial aired. I’m just saying…
I’m not an Apple fanboi, and I think the iPad is too large to drag around for day-to-day reading, so I don’t consider it Kindle 2/Nook competition. Kindle DX, on the other hand is going to lose to the iPad.
Downsides:
My bezel cracked over one of the forward buttons. I haven’t requested a replacement yet, but I hear that B&N might have modified the bezel to make it sturdier.
The library application is skewed towards buying books from B&N – you can’t even search by title or author for sideloaded content. At the very least, they should have supported their Fictionwise and eReader subsidiaries. Now that Amazon supports collections, I expect that the Nook will get a revamped library app that doesn’t differentiate between B&N and sideloaded content, and supports author, title and keyword search (covers, too, which I mostly use to show off to Kindle users). I have that right now because I’ve rooted my Nook, but it ought to be standard.
The reader needs a go to page feature. If you get a poorly formatted book without a table of contents, or really long chapters, it’s really hard to jump around if you want to go back and reread something.
The web browser needs to support downloads. Yes, I know it’s labeled beta, but I still wonder if this is part of the “steer the owner to B&N content only” mentality that gave us a nearly useless library application.
The Nook needs Text-to-speech. Even though I suspect most Amazon ebooks don’t allow TTS, this was the main reason why one of my coworkers bought a Kindle. The Nook is based on Android 1.5, TTS was standard on Android 1.6. Maybe B&N can add the TTS libraries to Android 1.5, or upgrade the Nook to Android 1.6 or later in an upcoming firmware release.
The Nook needs password protection.
B&N should also consider opening a Nook marketplace. I’m sure people would be willing to buy CIFS/SMB support (remote access to SDHC card) over wireless, a better audio player, etc., and B&N would get a percentage of each sale.
To sum it up, I don’t regret buying my Nook, but it still has several firmware releases to go before it will be a great ereader, instead of being a good one.