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Barnes & Noble's Nook, Reviewed
harrymcc writes "Barnes & Noble's Nook — the most significant e-reader since Amazon's original Kindle — hits B&N's retail stores today. I've published an extensive review of the device, which is also the first e-reader to run Google's Android OS: It's an interesting and capable gadget in many ways, but the interface — which is sluggish and somewhat quirky — isn't polished enough to render it a Kindle killer."
What e-books need is not a kindle-killer but a dead-tree-killer.
Just need something that forces Amazon to keep innovating and keep pricing competitive.
Thanks, B&N!
Speaking as someone not living in the US ... and hence out of the AT&T whispernet, the fact that this can work over WiFi is a huge plus.
I'd totally pay 250 US for it, just for kicks. Especially if they'd publish something like a bird watcher's guide, which where I really miss having a ton of searchable content, but without the bulk to carry around.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
Perhaps it is my slashdot bias, but the story about Kindles having books removed from readers' machines still strikes a sour chord with me. I recognize that most consumers don't know a thing about and many don't care. I don't see much difference between book burning and book deleting. To me the reasons, are irrelevant. Abuse will always emerge when opportunity is given.
Amazon's reluctance to let the gadget out of the US market earlier makes the Kindle just another e-book reader, it has no iconic status that would warrant the "killer" adjective for any competitors, who are competing against it in equal footing pretty much everywhere.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Which reads any .pdf .djvu .younameit, e-ink, etc?
They can not be the ultimate quality, but they will put some fire in competition! Then prices will begin to be fair!
The review mentions AT&T 3G, but I couldn't find any mention of whether a new AT&T contract is required to buy the device at the stated price. If it is, then fsck that. If it isn't, then 'meh'. Its still pretty expensive. Wait for v 2.0.
Also, if one plugs its USB in, does it appear as 'USB storage', that one can copy PDF's to and be able to read them? Or is one required to use its proprietary software on a proprietary platform to load only special files with DRM?
And how about on wifi? Can one use any sort of standard protocol (ssh, ftp, smb) to copy PDF's in (or out) and/or can it navigate to an arbitrary URL and download a PDF, or does it only support the device accessing company-specified websites to 'buy' books?
Bottom line - Mandatory contract bad. Mandatory proprietary software bad.
The whole phrasse Kindle killer evokes some epic struggle to knock off the top dog in the market. Right now the iPhone/iPod touch appears to be the number 1 ebook reader. Meanwhile Amazon is afraid to release sales numbers for the Kindle because it would show it has been a disappointing seller.
I think the Kindle is a good idea, but for a single use device with a very high price it is not going to make any inroads into the market.
I'm glad that more e-readers are starting to come out. I hope to get one after a couple more generations and a huge price cut. Plastic Logic is coming out with an e-reader soon too. Yay for competition.
Wake me up when there's an ebook reader that works more like a real book.
It should have softish covers, and once you open it, there should be 2 screens inside (one for each page).
This way the screens would be protected all the time, and it would feel more natural as a reading tool
Just Curious: How do you handle electronic mail, what with the absence of stamps and envelopes and licking and such?
The Kindle does have one disadvantage that is making me give the Nook a stronger look.
PDF's.
I buy a lot of Role Playing materials from Steve Jackson Games' "e23" site. They are in very high quality PDF documents and something that can display them without having to lug around a large, heavy, and massively power hungry laptop is a god send.
However, even though I legally own a copy of the PDF, Amazon refused to convert the PDF into a Kindle Ready file due to (as I was informed) copyright issues.
The Nook supports PDF out of the box and the internal file storage as well as the expansion slot gives me the room for all of the PDF's that I have.
So while it might not be a Kindle Killer, it has some features that put it close enough to the Kindle to make it a worthwhile contender.
-- Wiccan Army, 13th Airborne Division "We will not fly silently into the night"
While I agree that an ebook reader can't compete with the soft touch and feel of a book yet, you really ought to try one. I've got a Sony Reader and its really not all that bad. The absence of backlighting makes it really easy on the eye, I charge the battery once in a couple of weeks -- admittedly I don't spend TOO much time reading -- but yes the battery life is reasonably long and the reader comes with a soft cover so you can hold it like a book although it still has one screen (yes the cover protects the screen as well).
What I like about e-readers is that I can read multiple books in parallel -- depending on my mood, I just pick one and continue where I left off and switch to something else when I get bored (ADD?). The one thing I'm missing with my reader (its an older model) is a built-in dictionary which I believe Kindle and Nook both have. The newer versions of the Sony Reader have them too along with note taking features. But yeah, its quite a nice gadget and I've done hours of fun reading on it. If you can get your hands on one (borrow?) for a short while, give it a shot. Takes a getting used to but you might be pleasantly surprised.
A book offers permanence. Books are created so the only infrastructure required to receive the information within is your brain. And how can you get rid of books authorities no longer like? Well, because of the light infrastructure requirements, you CAN'T. No book burning has ever deleted an entire work from the culture.
But if a corporation decides to "burn" an e-reader book, can they? They sure CAN! And the book will be gone with no chance of ever discovering an unburnt copy.
Sorry, no. The function I want is PERMANENCE. That cannot be built into an e-reader.
There was new firmware recently released (Amazon release notes) that adds, among other things like longer battery life, native PDF reader support to the Kindle 2. (Note, the Kindle DX had native PDF support since it was released months ago.)
Like pi? Try 10,000 digits.
Could someone please explain the advantage of a dedicated e-book reader? I don't understand why I would buy either when I can get a netbook for $50 more (at worst) that can read both PDFs and Amazon e-books. Is it the battery life of these things, or is the hardware form factor really nice? I don't know.
df -h
It makes extensive mention of BN's support for epub.
Best Slashdot Co
Have you used an eBook, like daily?
Its better the way it is. The reading is more natural, its easier to hold, its easier to use than a book in confined settings (or laying in bed, I've found).
Just because books had facing pages for 400 years doesn't mean its automatically the ultimate user experience for reading ...
No book burning has ever deleted an entire work from the culture.
Are you sure no works died with the Library of Alexandria?
Reading a book scrolling is a much harder way to read compared to flipping pages. Besides, if your e-ink scrolled you would eat your battery up as fast as... well, as fast as an LCD.
Saying you will wait for e-ink to scroll before you try it is like saying you won't buy a car until they hover, fly and go 500MPH.
But, I guess that's your prerogative.
Incidentally, my spell checker made me investigate... I've always heard the word pronounced "perogative", not with an extra "r" in there, but I realize now that I've never seen the word written down. Odd. Anyone have any light to shed on that?
He also seems unaware that pretty much every eBook reader will read a wide variety of formats from ASCII through to proprietry formats. It's the DRM that's the killer. But I suspect he knows this, and he's actually meaning Apple's decision to strip the DRM from iTunes rather than letting iPods play MP3s. In a similar vein, we can hope that the Kindle dies an exceedingly ugly death and the other vendors all strip the DRM from their ePubs, which would be more or less the equivalent scenario..
Do people actually do this? Do folks actually read in the bathtub?
Don't the pages get all weird from the humidity? What if you drop your book in the water? Don't your wet hands mess up the pages?
Short answer: yes people do.
There are obstacles of course, but once you're settled down there are few things as relaxing.
I'm sure everyone has their own routines. One way is to lower oneself into the bath while holding the book, without getting either hand wet. Another is to put the book on a reachable dry surface, then get into the bath, then towel your hands dry, and get the book.
When it's time to stop reading and start washing, toss the book onto a dry surface. I've never found that the temporary humidity did lasting damage to a book. Dropping one in is obviously disastrous.
Best only read light paperbacks or magazines in the bath.
Reading in the tub is the killer app for e-books.
Just put your nook or kindle or sony or whatever in a zip-lock bag, and you don't have to worry about it getting wet.
I am so tired of hearing "e-readers will never replace books" arguments, as if it were an all-or-nothing thing. I can well imagine stone carvers makers the same "permanence" argument against books.
E-readers still can't do a lot of what books do, but so what? Half the books I read, I read once, then give them away or return them to the library. For these, an e-reader is perfectly fine. And as the technology advances, a physical book will have fewer and fewer advantages.
Frankly, I think all this strident ranting against e-books is just people resisting having to learn new ways of doing things. Which is fine for them, but why must they lecture the rest of us all the time?
And as a writer myself, I have very little patience when this attitude shows up in the people I work with. In particular, it's a pain when editors and reviewers insist on physical copies so they can scribble comments in the margin. So then I have to decipher their handwriting and cryptic comments. And once, when I did an actual mass-market book, the publisher's editor and I had to FedEx pages back and forth, at great cost in time and money. Learn to use Acrobat, people!
Different strokes / different folks, I realize, but by way of contrast: I have some other objections to most eBook readers (which I feel getting worn away by interest / curiosity / gadget lust), but I really like that the trend so far is for *single*-screen devices. I like to read books, but I also like to eat or drink while I'm reading. There are all sorts of contrivances for keeping books open and angled at a table, and there are some chairs where it's not too hard, but I've spilled a lot of drinks / dropped a lot of crumbs because I was using one hand to hold the book open and one hand for the food -- I think this would be a lot simpler to avoid with a one-screen device, esp. with a simple angled stand.
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5