Nook; the Barnes and Noble e-Reader

It sure does look sexy. We already have a Kindle though. Still, very tempting.

Haven't seen much regarding their DRM policy.

It kills the kindle for sexiness. But, usability is the real key, and given how bad B&N's ebook store apparently is, I'm not too optimistic about their reader. (Not to mention, despite the aesthetic appeal, I don't get the utility of the LCD)

It's cool, but my feeling is it's too little too late. If the rumored Apple tablet (and e-book section of the iTunes store) actually materializes, it will likely eventually slaughter all dedicated e-readers.

Just the mere potential of the Tablet holds me back from buying an eReader.

LD what are the problems with the B&N ebook store?

There are some weird prices. There's an Anne Rice book that sells for $7.99 as an over-sized paperback that costs $20 to get as an ebook.

The Apple tablet won't be an e-reader. Rumor has it being more like a giant iPod touch, coming in 3G and non-3G flavors. You're paying for a mobile computing device that has all of the other cool features that regular touches have. The ability to display newspapers, magazines, and e-books in large sizes and crisp, bright, full color using the multi-touch interface is just gravy.

So not only did Barnes and Noble knock the price of the Nook down to $199 today, they also introduced a Wi-Fi only version for $149. I might be all over the Wi-Fi version. I can still use it at home, and there'e enough free Wi-Fi places around to make it worth it (although on the go, I'd use it more for reading than buying).

Of course, Amazon knocked the Kindle down about $80 today as well.

The Kindle now being cheaper than the nook is a huge, huge sign about how serious amazon is about this. This is going to be a great time for customers.

Yeah, today was a fun day at work with this bullshit.

Keep in mind when you're considering nook v. kindle that Amazon is currently fighting with publishers over prices, and publishers are pulling books/titles in retaliation. Penguin, for example.

The new 1.4 firmware includes access to ANY AT&T wifi hotspot, so if you live somewhere with a high concentration of available wifi, the $149 version without 3G will likely suffice.

I bought my nook a few months ago, and I love the shit out of it. E-ink is all it's cracked up to be, if you read a lot.

I'll buy one of these things for $149.

Nice. I need the blessing of Miss Zooey however before I invest in one. It feels so sacrilegious. I'm afraid my old English teachers will catch me in a coffee shop with one someday and weep.

My biggest problem with nook is that the stuff I like to read when I'm not binging on crime fiction isn't available yet. A lot of the great mid-century writers like Roth, Cheever, Bellow, Updike, their early stuff isn't available. But William Styron's estate just released all his hot jams, so, bonus.

Also, Jake, these things are GREAT for binging on crime fiction. You can get the long-out-of-print Richard Prather Shell Scott series, the Matt Scudder novel that's OOP, lotta good shit. Plant shit.

So annoying, my girlfriend just bought the stand alone Sony Reader 2 weeks ago because the nook was $100 more. Now that they're the same price though, I wish we'd waited a bit longer.

Also, if you're sitting in B&N with your Nook, you can read any book FOR FREE. Now that it's dropping, I may buy one for my wife for our anniversary in August. Just the wi-fi version. We have like...over a thousand books in our house. She doesn't like to get rid of anything, and she re-reads stuff all the time, especially if it's a series and the new book is about to come out. She'll re-read the entire series again leading up to it.

I think you can only read free for an hour though. Not that I'd sit in B&N much longer than that.

Yeah, the Nook's sharing features remind me a lot of Zune's "song sharing" at launch. If they were fairly implemented, they'd be a massive competitive advantage over competing products. But, as it stands, they don't amount to much, and the nook is somewhat inferior to the Kindle in other respects.

The Nook having a memory card slot is a big plus for me. As well as the fact that it supports document formats the Kindle doesn't.

What I've learned over the last six months or so is that a lot of this is publisher-dependent. The publishers want to find a medium between supporting print and supporting eReaders, and so that's why you have limitations on things like the "read in store" feature and what books can be lent out. One of the advantages the nook has over some of the other devices is that it runs the Google android software, so not only is there the potential to introduce apps further down the line (you can already play chess and brows the web on the nook), but it's already been hacked to run things like Pandora and a facebook application.

*gets an erection and starts hyperventilating*

I made the decision a week or two ago to pick up either a Kindle or Nook. Actually, the decision was to get a Kindle, never really considering an alternative. Now you fine folks are leading me to believe the Nook is a viable option. I am a fan of the price drop, and it is very rare one happens before I buy something (usually it occurs roughly 31 days after I have made the purchase).

Am I wrong in figuring that 3G isn't super necessary because I already have an Incredroid telephone? Stupid question, but once I download the book, I don't need INTERNET access to read, right?



I need someone to flat out tell me which one to get.

Once you buy the book, it's not necessary to be connected to the internet in order to read it. It's stored on the device's hard drive.

I would go with the nook, but I also recommend going into a Barnes & Noble and looking at it for yourself first.

I plan on checking it out. The Kindle, too, now that they sell them at Target.

I think we're all fairly partisan here. I'm a kindle fan (and Engadget and Gizmodo agree with me), and the kindle is cheaper, but only by 10.

Probably the fairest breakdown is that the Kindle is the more polished product. For any function performed by both the Kindle and the Nook do, the Kindle is likely to perform that function better. However, the Nook does have some additional features that the kindle doesn't offer (book lending, reading books in B&N, the SD card support). Having tried both, I find the Nook's interface to be unintuitive and sluggish, while the hardware itself is kind of clumsy.

Then again, my favorite ereader, going away, is any e-reader application on the iPad.

I'll be honest, how much do you want your e-reader to do is kind of the crux. The truth is that if you just want something that you can put books on and turn the page and read (you know, how you usually read a book) they're all pretty good.

I've seen the nook in the store and the LCD is an interesting concept but it's sluggish and seems disjoint from the digital ink display above. Still, the nook does support the DRM format used by OverDrive to allow e-book checkout from your local library. The selection at mine isn't huge but it's better than nothing. And it seems like if more and more people were getting readers capable of handling their stuff, that the library would buy more digital books.

I'm not a huge book buyer myself though so most of my reading is done through the library so the Kindle locking me into buying books from Amazon makes it a non-starter.

This. I refuse to use a Kindle because they lock you into a content provider, or an iPad, because e-ink is vastly superior when you read a ton. Because I CAN read something on an ipod touch doesn't mean it is a pleasurable experience.

nook is content provider agnostic, which has me scratching my head about B&N's business model, but is the biggest benefit of the device. You can buy from just about any online ebookstore, borrow from a couple of different library systems through Adobe Digital Editions, get books from Google, Project Gutenberg, or Baen Free Library, side-load them via USB, and be reading in a few seconds.

Not true. I was a big believer in the "e-ink is easier on the eyes!" school of thought, but recent studies suggest that it's not true. Plus, my own experience with the two suggests that, in anything other than direct sunlight, it is SO much more pleasant to read on the iPad.

Not to mention I'm close to selling my Kindle after figuring I use the iPod Kindle app more than the actual device itself.

But I prefer checking out physical books from the library, so I'm a bad example.

I would have agreed with you just 2 weeks ago but after spending some time with my GF's Sony Reader I've completely changed my mind about LCD vs. e-ink. Plus, the fact that you can get much better battery life with the display vs. LCD I can see how I'd like one if I'm not looking for a multifunction device.

We'll just have to disagree, as I have both as well. My iPad has virtually replaced my kindle, except for my time on the metro.

Plus, $199 vs. $499 is a compelling argument.

Actually, I think that's more likely to derail than anything else.

That's funny, because we're locked into the "read for an hour" feature at our stores in NYC.

Well, my wife surprised me by getting me the Wi-Fi model and I'm absolutely enthralled with it. It effortlessly took a bunch of PDF books that I had on my hard drive and from some various eBook sites I tried out, the Wi-Fi set up was a breeze, and the books I got from the store both through the Nook and on my PC came through without a hitch. Looking forward to trying out the magazine subscriptions too.

Those skins are a pain in the ass, but the covers are great.

Richard, make sure you keep an eye out for software updates in 'The Daily,' as they always improve the device by leaps and bounds. You can also hit me up via PM if you're having any difficulty or problems and I'll see what I can do.

Appreciate it Rath. And Cocoa, my wife got a nice cover for it as well.

First purchase was both volumes of the Complete Sherlock Holmes for four bucks.

Are you talking about the film kit, or are you talking about the silicone skins that go around the sides and back of the device?

I really like the Jonathan Adler Quote cover, but that LCD light case is all kinds of hot.

Just a plain black cover for now. Might look around to see what else is available. Not really interested in skins though.

And I downright pillaged the free eBooks they have on the B&N site.

Make sure to hit up http://overdrive.com/ to see if your library supports it as well.

Just added a New Yorker subscription. $2.99 per month is a pretty good deal.

Looks like my wife's siblings are getting together to finally get her a reader for her birthday at the end of the month, and I'm wondering if I should suggest Sony or Nook to them? Since it's supposed to be a surprise, I'm doing my best not to ask my wife too many revealing questions.

To start with, she's enamored of all things Sony, at least from a design point of view. If I understand it correctly, the Touch features Memory Stick and SD card expandability, and the Pocket doesn't, and neither come with any wireless capability-- do I have that right? She doesn't see wireless as being all that important, since we don't spend a lot of money on books in the first place, and she'd probably focus on borrowing e-books from the catalog of our local library system (plus she loves classics, and already reads a lot of Project Gutenberg and similar stuff on her computer). But I think she's a little worried about the 512K limitation on the Pocket. Among other things, she claims she wouldn't listen to music on it, to save battery life, but I suspect that might change once it was in her hands, and then the storage limitation does become a factor.

A bit of reading suggests that a lot of people are lukewarm, at best, about Sony's interface, but that once you get to learn it, it gets the job done. Anyone else have experience with that?

Anything else I should know about the Sony e-readers?

As for the Nook, seeing the $149 price point on the wi-fi Nook is very impressive. If I were getting one for myself, that's the one I'd jump on. If you're not using the Internet to purchase books directly onto the device, does it matter much whether you get wi-fi or 3G? Does it actually have any other Internet capability besides buying books and magazine subscriptions or reading in-store?

Any thoughts on the screen itself or the interface, or how Sony and Nook compare in those regards? And am I right that the Nook uses microSD versus regular SD?

Because my wife's sister, whose idea this was, has been very happy with her Sony Pocket, I suspect that's the direction they're going to head, but we'll see. I'm going to try and work in a trip to B & N this weekend to try and play with a Nook, and see what my wife thinks of it.

Anyway, if anyone's got thoughts, comments, feedback on either device, I'd love to read it. I know there's other alternatives to those two, but I don't think I can persuade my in-laws to look at more than a couple of different devices.