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Barnes & Noble Won't Give Up On the Nook
jfruh writes "Barnes & Noble's Nook e-reader line has largerly been regarded as a botched attempt to compete with the Kindle, whose failure has contributed to the bookseller's financial woes. Well, despite earlier statements that the company was abandoning it as a hardware platform, now the B&N CEO insists that the company is committed to the product line and the new Nooks are in development."
of a company proactively doing the right thing, embracing technology at the risk of cannibalizing its own products by redefining their business as something larger than selling books. They implemented the technology the right way, or at least have received awards and top scores from magazines such as Consumer Reports, set a reasonable price (easily within the budget of a large proportion of existing customers), and marketed it aggressively - the Nook is front and center in many of the B&N stores I go to.
And it still hasn't worked out for them.
So the next time you hear some MBA smarties belittling CEOs of flailing companies for not having the vision to go beyond what made them successful in the past, remember the Nook. It's not as easy as these pundits make it sound.
It doesn't have a physical button for page turning, but tapping the edge of the screen will flip the page; you don't have to gesture for it.
The Nook Simple Touch does have those buttons.
If you ask me (which I guess the OP did), the Nook Simple Touch is a great little device, but the Nook Tablets are worthless. Since you can get the Nook App on just about any tablet (including Windows 8 tablets) you might as well get a tablet you actually want and then just install that, if you really want to use Nook ebooks on a tablet. There's no compelling reason to get a Nook Tablet.
The Nook Simple Touch, on the other hand, is a nice, small device that's rugged enough for me to throw in my pocket and carry around all day, if I wanted to. The display is OK. It's an e-ink display, so it works well in bright lights, and if you get the one that has the glow feature, it works in low light too. I don't like any of the fonts that the Simple Touch offers, though.
All that being said - I expect everything applies to the Kindle as well, so - no, there's really no compelling reason to choose the Nook. There's a very good reason to get a Kindle instead: Amazon has a much better selection. (Yeah, I kind of regret my Nook purchase, but not enough to replace it with a Kindle.)
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
All that being said - I expect everything applies to the Kindle as well, so - no, there's really no compelling reason to choose the Nook. There's a very good reason to get a Kindle instead: Amazon has a much better selection. (Yeah, I kind of regret my Nook purchase, but not enough to replace it with a Kindle.)
That's not much of a selling point, since you can install and run Kindle on the Nook, but you can't install Nook reader on the Kindle. So that means the Nook actually has a bigger selection.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
The main problem with Nook is that they're only available for sale in the US and the UK. They're better than Kindle in most ways. I've had two Nooks, one was the original and the other is Nook Simple Touch Glow. The only reason I upgraded was that I smashed the older one. Anyways, they both feature a MicroSD slot, the ability to buy ebooks from pretty much any store not ending in azon.com. And Nook had a real light before anybody else did. I've used it and the glow light works well. Even lighting across the whole screen without it straining the eyes. Also, Nook was the first reader to get the page flipping right. It has 2 sets of physical buttons so you can turn the page which ever way you hold it. But, it also has the touch screen to turn pages as well. Which works pretty well, except if you accidentally click on a citation link. But, in general the thing about Nook is that it's just solid hardware with good design. The main problem I have with it is that the book shelves are a PITA to use. You have to shelve the books on the device itself, which doesn't work out well if you have a huge number of books.
I disagree, if you buy an ebook from Amazon you're pretty much stuck with Amazon devices. But, Nook uses epub with DRM from Adobe, so, my Nook can read books from just about any store that sells them. Whereas Nook requires that you get the books converted, or stick with Amazon books.
I've personally bought ebooks from Oreilly, Smashwords, B&N, Kobo and Ebooks.com, and they all work without converting them. And even the stores that sell DRM ebooks, I can load those without having to crack the DRM. Which I couldn't do with Kindle, unless I buy from Amazon.
But, more importantly, if I decide I don't like the next generation of Nook and my current one breaks, I can switch to a competing ebook reader, without having to crack my library or buy it a second time. Something that's impossible with Kindle.
I Have a Nook, and a Kindle.
The Nook Simple Touch is the best eBook reader I have ever used, and I have used pretty much every major version of every major brand that has been released.
I read a lot, several novels a week on average, and so small things make a huge impact for me.
The Nook has a very nice tactile feel. Its coated with a rubberized like surface that is much easier to hold then the standard hi-gloss body plastic on most devices. The shape of the device, particularly the back panel, is very ergonomic, and easy to hold. It has the all important page turn buttons, a huge requirement for me. It has fairly good battery life, and the GUI is easy to user and understand.
There are some flaws.
You can't delete a file from the device, you have to plug it in to a computer to do so. The home page, which is different then your library seems useless to me, but that could perhaps be for people who read magazines, and other documents on the device. The device requires you to swipe across the screen to unlock, which can cause problems because the touch screen isn't capacitive touch, it uses infrared to detect touch, so if there is any dust around the edges of the screen, touch will fail.
Overall though, I love the device.
I bought a nook Simple Touch for my Mother's birthday. It seemed like a good deal (reduced from £80 to £30 for "London Literacy Week") and there were numerous books listed in the "free content" from the 1800s that had been published right next to where she lived that would be of interest to her in her Genealogy hobby.
From the start I was annoyed by it - you couldn't activate it to use in any way without first associating it both with a working Credit Card and an active email address. As it was going to be a surprise I had to go to the trouble of setting up a separate email address just so she wouldn't be tipped off by the (non-optional) "purchase notifications" it sent to that address every time you added a book.
Then, there were the restrictions. 80% of the storage was reserved for DRM'd material - if you downloaded restriction-free files from Gutenberg or similar you could only fill 20% of the provided storage. Oh, and remember all those "free" books I researched before buying it? *Every one* on the US site refused to download saying that "For copyright reasons this content is restricted to US downloads only". Even though I was in Scotland, and the books were published in Scotland, *in the 1800s*...
Oh, and the clunky DRM support requires you to run a piece of third-party (Adobe) software to "authenticate" the device that's not available in any form under Linux. I ended up having to download and install a pirate copy of Windows just to be able to initialise the machine! (I feel so *dirty*...)
There turned out to be a much smaller selection available on the UK site. Of those, maybe one in six would fail to download and crash the machine. Barnes and Noble "fixed" this by deleting the files remotely, and proudly emailed to say the problem had been "resolved". Er, no. "Resolved" would have been for the books to be in a condition to be read on the device that was purchased to read them - anything else doesn't qualify as a "resolution".
The device itself died three weeks into setting it up, and it took the best part of *two months* to get a replacement. (From their factory in Poland...) Which was dead on arrival. At least the next replacement took less than a week. And then I had to set about loading all the books from scratch.
Oh, and the "local number" telephone support was a very faint woman with a Canadian-sounding accent over a bad VoIP link with a 2-3 second delay. But you don't need to worry about that any more, as since I had all these problems they've withdrawn the support number entirely and now you are forced to use "Live Chat" on the wensite during the hours of 9am-6pm. *Their* time zone. Which translates to 5pm-2am where I live.
So, now it works. Except that as my Mother doesn't have a Credit Card I've had to leave it registered with mine. And something like 80% of the "Front Page" you get when you turn it on is something that will lead to you spending money if you click on it. I've had to simply scramble the wi-fi settings so it can't communicate to purchase *anything*. If they'd been a bit more subtle about it I might have left her with the option of buying new books, but as things stand their money-grabbing philosophy has backfired.
Sorry this is such a long rant. The really annoying thing, above all else, is that when it works it works really well - the touch screen is extremely responsive, the battery life is good and if they didn't screw you with the hellishly intrusive DRM I would have been happy to pay two to three times as much for the hardware.
My primary motivation for buying a Nook instead of a Kindle was my interest in supporting competition for the 8000-ton gorilla that is Amazon. Consumers benefit when there are at least two comparable options to choose from. Also, as a long-standing bookseller with experience dealing with calls for censorship, B&N has also been less prone to kneejerk removal of books, and (as far as I've heard) they haven't been caught purging their ebook catalog of fiction that touches on controversial themes. (Which is an example of why competition is needed.)
I replaced my Nook with the latest model when the original one was damaged because I'd found that it was also just a plain good device. I especially like the big page-turning buttons, which make it easy to operate while running on the treadmill at the gym.
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