So. I was debating a lot between the Kindle and Barnes & Noble's Nook and I'd just made up my mind I was probably going to get the Kindle when my father said something that made me think he was getting me an ereader of some stripe for Christmas. So I shelved my plans until I knew for sure. And indeed, my father bought me a Nook.
Me, personally, I'm less inclined to trust the review of a tech writer or the manufacturer's assessments than I am to trust the 'man on the street' type of reviews, especially from my friends, who generally have similar needs and wants from their tech. So I thought I'd maybe start to write up my thoughts about the Nook.
(image heavy below the cut)
1. It's small.
I mean that in a good way; I can hold it easily in one of my (admittedly large) hands. I can, further, hold it easily in one of my hands and turn the page. And, as noted before, it slips easily into my purse, which is about medium size.
2. Turning pages.
There's a forward and backward button on either side of the Nook (if you look at the picture, you can see the arrows on both sides; my thumb is covering the left-hand page forward button). I imagine this is good for righties or lefties but it's also good for a variety of grips or reading in bed.
3. Eyestrain.
This could be a plus or minus. The Nook is not backlit, like a computer screen. This means that I don't have the same eyestrain/headache problems I get from reading for too long on a computer…but it also means that I have to have some light source to be able to read, just as with a regular book.
4. Font, Color Gradation, etc.
Despite its small size, I find the medium default font and the reading screen to be more than adequate for easy reading. However it does have the ability to change to smaller (which I found virtually unreadable) or larger (which I haven't tried) fonts. I don't have anything to compare it to, obviously, but I also found the grayscale for images to be really amazing. Cover art, though rendered in B&W, doesn't lose any of its image quality.
5. "Outside" books.
I have a number of ebooks that I bought from sites like Loose Id, Samhain, etc. It was extremely simple for me to hook up the Nook to my computer by the included USB cable and then copy the books from my computer HD and then paste them into the "My Documents" folder on the Nook.
On the down side, however, most of those books seem to have formatting problems, where page (or even sentence) breaks don't fall where they're supposed to. This means can make reading a little choppy, especially as it can take the Nook a second or two to change pages. The books I have are in pdf format (which can be kind of inflexible, imo); I don't know if it would be different if I'd gotten them in different formats, but I'll probably check that out some time later.
Another problem I noticed—and I haven't yet tested this against books I bought directly from B&N—is that the Nook has twice lost my page while reading an "other" book; once after I'd shut the Nook all the way off and once after I'd uploaded some of my own ebooks that I had in a different folder than the majority. Both times, when I tried to go back to what I was reading, it opened at the novel's beginning and no longer registered the bookmark I'd put in place, meaning I had to personally repage through 89 and 116 pages respectively. That is a major pain in the ass and a major drawback. As I said, I don't know if there would be the same problem with an authorized book from B&N, since I haven't tested that yet, but either way, boo, hiss!
6. Browsing and Buying Books.
This is kind of a mixed bag, imo. I like the fact that I can go to the B&N website and buy books for myself and then just have the Nook look for new content. It's sometimes easier and faster for me to do it on my laptop than on the Nook.
The Nook doesn't really come with a user manual. Or…it does, but it's on the Nook itself. The packaging only comes with a brief start-up guide. On the other hand, the Nook is intuitive enough that it wasn't a big problem. My first problem was figuring out the relationship between the touch screen and the reader screen. I kept wanting to select from the reader screen and you can't. Everything has to be done from the touch screen at the bottom.
At the top of the touch screen is a little Nook logo (which looks like an upside down 'u' or a horseshoe to me, but whatever, they want to be cute). Tapping the 'n' takes you to the menu screen. However, unlike the rest of the buttons, I find the 'n' button isn't as responsive and I often have to tap it a couple times to get it's attention. Perhaps I'm not being assertive enough, since I'm in that new parent stage of being very careful with the new tech, I dunno.
Anyway, the main menu options are (from left to right) The Daily, My Library, Shop, Reading Now, and Settings (sorry the pix are kind of blurry, I took them all on my camera phone).
The Daily is just the Nook's message board, kinda. They have a couple columnists that seem to post things to it, and there's informational stuff about the nook, including an essay by Dave Barry about the Nook. Meh.
My Library is just what it says. It's divided into "My B&N Library" and "My Documents", showing that segregation is alive and well in Nook-land. *g* Honestly, that doesn't bother me, but, as yet, I haven't seen a way to organize the books in either category and that annoys me a little bit. I'd really like to be able to tag or otherwise differentiate between books so I don't have to go paging through (as I add more and more books) a dozen or more pages of titles to get to the one I want. There also doesn't seem to be a way to search in library, which would help alleviate the problem. Considering the Nook is supposed to be expandable with a micro-SD card, I could end up with several thousand books on a single device and the thought of having to page through them ten by ten is kind of horrifying. Ugh.
Edit: There is a search function on the library. It is also possible to reorg the data by common labels like Author, Title, etc.
Shop is also just what it sounds like. There's a few options: search, browse, collections, and ewish list. Search is really the most useful function for obvious reasons. If you select "browse", it brings up the list of best sellers as the home page, but offers the option to browse by subject/genre. Collections is, for me, utterly useless, since its "collections" are: Best Sellers, New Releases, B&N Recommends, NYT Bestsellers, Romance Top 100 and Teens Top 100. Which pretty much excises 90% of what I read. Ewish list is obvious: it's the books I myself have designated for my wish list, available to be browsed and/or bought at any time.
What I find interesting is that if you look on the B&N website under ebooks, there's an option for "free ebooks", but the Nook has no such category, meaning you can't browse any free books from the Nook itself, a bit of slickness that irritates me.
Reading Now is the book you last had open. There are options here for: Find, Go to, Bookmarks and Font. I imagine these would be more useful for reading books purchased from B&N, but when reading "outsider" books, they were fairly well useless, since the Nook dropped/lost my bookmark and the "go to" option does not include the option to go to a specific page. Instead, the options are: Furthest read point, cover, chapter. The Nook also demonstrated an inability to tell the chapters of the outsider book apart, which (as I mentioned before) meant manually paging through the book again to find my place. Which was almost enough to make me give up on the book altogether.
I hope I don't need to explain settings to anyone. There's really not much you need to fiddle with here, anyway.
The touch screen itself is pretty responsive. I don't really have any complaints about that. However, and possibly because of the touch screens responsiveness, I feel like B&N has put a lot of redundancy into the systems. There's a lot of "are you sure you REALLY want to do this?" screens which, personally, annoy me. (Of course, I also don't have kids and I don't leave my Nook where the animals might walk across it, meaning I don't have to worry about the cats accidentally purchasing thousands of dollars of books)
It would be nice, imo, if they had an option to buy a book from the search screen (instead, you have to select the book, and then click "buy for $[price]" and then confirm you want to buy it and then click okay when it tells you that it's going to download it in just a second. That's WAY too much redundancy for me. I would like a 1-click option, pls. I'd even settle for 2 clicks.
Similarly, when shopping on the B&N website, I wish there was a way to shopping cart the ebooks, in the event you're going to buy more than one at a time. Instead, you have to go through the process for each book. Which, if you're only buying one book, is not that annoying. But, for example, if you're buying all 14 of the Wizard of Oz books because they're .99 each and OMGYAY! (*coughs*), then the constant need to shuttle back and forth between screens and reorg the data gets old fast. Especially since the website doesn't seem to always remember what screen you were on and may take you back 2 pages instead of just one.
Though I haven't done an extensive comparison, some of the research I've done has shown that Amazon may/does have the lead on ebook pricing compared to B&N. Though most of the bestsellers and so forth are comparable at 9.99 each, prices seem to vary on the more back-end, mid-list, obscure books. I also don't know what the comparison is of what ebooks are available by Amazon versus B&N.
Um. I think that's all my thoughts so far. And, wow, they were kind of more extensive than I thought. For all the negative, I do like my Nook so far (though it could use improvement) and I really wish I'd had it before I bought Stephen King's Under the Dome in hardcover. It would've been much easier to read that behemoth on a reader screen than trying to juggle the 5lb. book in bed without concussing myself or my husband.
No comments:
Post a Comment