Screen shot 2010-04-23 at 10.16.20 AM.pngB&N has detailed the features of the version 1.3 Nook upgrade. They include:

a beta Read In Store function that will allow you t read complete ebooks in B&N stores. Reports indicate the the ebook will disappear from the machine when you leave the store.

Soduku and Chess

Wi-Fi connectivity in more hotspots and a basic web browser.

Additional “reading and performance improvements, such as faster page turns and an enhanced home screen.”

More details at the B&N site here.

2 COMMENTS

  1. We can hope that the ‘freezing’ issues that some people had are fixed. Time will tell.

    For those of us who use the nook for reading e-books, the 1.3 update has proven disappointing. We did get significantly faster page turns (and e-book opening), the dictionary is now somewhat usable, and we can sort the list of sideloaded e-books by “most recent”. B&N says battery life has been improved; we’ll see.

    The update doesn’t add any new tools for navigating e-books—Go To Page, Skip Forward/Backward n Pages, etc.

    The update doesn’t add any new ability to manage e-book collections except for sorting sideloaded e-books titles by “most recent”. There are still no bookshelves. There is still no ability to mark an e-book as ‘read’. There is still no ability to search titles of sideloaded e-books. The title-sort features still lump most titles under “A”, “An”, and “The”. E-books bought from B&N are still segregated from sideloaded e-books.

    Newly introduced bug: book titles in sideloaded content that contain non-English characters now display gibberish for those characters.

    It’s not clear from the early reports if the highlighting and notes features work now or not.

    There are no new fonts, and no new font sizes.

    PDF viewing is as weak as ever (probably an Adobe Reader Mobile issue). We can hope that the bug is fixed where the nook freaked out if a bad PDF file was sideloaded.

    The “read complete ebooks in B&N stores” claim is stretching the truth. You can read a given e-book for one hour. The B&N statement is accurate only if you can read the complete e-book in an hour. Supposedly you can come back the next day and read the same e-book for another hour, but since it’ll restart at the cover and you can only page forward one page at a time, you’ll spend a good part of that time getting back to where you were. Reportedly, only selected e-books are eligible for this feature.

    I like my nook. But I use it for reading e-books, and I do wish that B&N would add some features to make that experience even nicer. This update didn’t help much.

  2. Reading the whole texts in stores is brilliant. Great way to sell espressos and muffins with huge markup.

    Sudoku and crosswords are about the only kind of games that work well on e-ink. Scrabble would also work well.

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