Guest Post: Why I Chose the Barnes and Noble Nook

I had my son Josh do a review of the Barnes and Noble Nook because despite Rod's belief I don't own every gadget.  If you have not jumped into the ebook pool or bought a Sony EReader, Kindle or iPad you may want to consider the Nook.

I've never been much of a mobile guy, personally. A techno-snob? Absolutely. Shelling out $400 for a top of the line graphics card barely causes me to bat an eyelash, but I've always regarded mobile devices somewhat dubiously. It is a hard sell for me to shell out hundreds and hundreds of dollars for a device which runs games like a half-baked, failed, super nintendo prototype. While I've come to depend heavily on e-mail and calendar's on my phone, for actually doing work, it is a lackluster solution. I do love my second generation iPod (still running strong) for its stalwart music playing, but I've never been sold on any of the subsequent versions.

Thus was the state of my mind when the Kindle first entered the scene. This was the first mobile device of any kind that I was ever immediately intrigued by. I watched its progress and acceptance, but never reached critical mass where I decided I was going to try one out. This changed a bit with the announcement of The Nook, by Barnes and Noble.

Where before I was only mildly interested by e-readers, once I placed my order for my Nook, the fact that it was back ordered was torturous. Now I've owned it for close to two months, have read almost 20 books, totaling near 10,000 pages, and feel qualified to give a review of it.

First, the good:

1) While e-ink is no longer quite cutting edge, I cannot believe how pleased I am with it. The Nook, specifically, has a brilliant, large screen. You'll find this the same with all e-readers using e-ink, however, if you've not experienced it, it is quite a selling point. Removing the backlight from an electronic device does wonders for your eyes and it is astonishing how pleasant the experience is. The ability to re-size and change your font was also an unexpected favorite of mine.

2) The Android operating system. This was actually what initially interested me in the Nook. I'm a big fan of the concept of Android, although not always the implementation. The reason this was a big deal for me, is because as Android is becoming an increasingly main-stream OS, the ability and requisite skill sets to release Nook/Android applications grows. Last I'd heard, Barnes and Noble had no official plans to release a Nook app store, although they had not ruled it out yet.  However, the device has already been rooted and people are tinkering with it. It gives me hope that, in the future, I'll be able to customize my Nook far outside of the standard interface.

3) Sharing Books. The Nook has it, and what a wonderful feature. My brother and I actually purchased Nooks at the same time, and we have the ability to loan each book, once, to a friend for two weeks.  This is a fairly essential feature for me since this allows me to continue my normal reading habits. My brother and I will read different series, and then swap books. Any other e-reader would force us to buy two copies of the same book.

4) The touch screen. While I was not immediately convinced by the touch-screen (as a rule, I hate a UI that requires me to block my view to use it), it has grown on me. My favorite feature of it has actually been the ability to turn pages via a swipe across the touch-screen. This allows me to read in absolute silence, or in cramped spaces (such as a flight), I can use minimal motion of my thumb to page forward and backward.

5) I can set the Nook down on a table and eat with both hands while reading. I'm not even kidding. It is amazing. Also? No paper cuts.

Now, the Bad:

1) The release version of the OS was extremely shaky. My product was scarcely usable for the first two weeks. It rebooted itself at random, and, of course, would not save my page. It was extremely frustrating. Within a few weeks, they released an update that fixed most of these problems, but sometimes I wake in the middle of the night with a cold sweat, with flashbacks of hitting the page forward button 300+ times to get back to my spot.

2) The buttons are a bit brittle. While my Nook is still functional, the lower-right hand button has cracked. I do read -a lot-, but it seems to me that 2 months is too early for something like that to break. Luckily, this is covered under the stock 1-year warranty. It appears, after reading the official Nook forums, that I appear to be the exception rather than the rule, with broken buttons.

3) There are still some stability issues. Occasionally my Nook still freezes, and I have to reboot. It takes me a minute or so to reboot and get back to my spot (but it automagically remembers my page numbers now!)

4) While I have space for thousands of books, the interface seems hardcoded for 1,250 books currently, and when you add new content, it can be fairly annoying as you wait a minute or two for it to scan all of the content. And, if by some unlucky chance, you have a corrupt e-book? The only way to know is to go through them one-by-one, or else your Nook library will largely be inaccessible to you.

Summary

In summary, I'd generally recommend the Nook. I'm nowhere near as zealous about it as your standard iPhone user, but I am very happy with mine. As B & N releases new updates the stability increases and additional features are added, it looks like the usability and stability are only going to get better with time. And most importantly, you are not hopping on the cliche Kindle band-wagon, nor are you selling out to the Megalithic Sony. You're signing on with a B & N product running on an open source OS. You can tell your Linux buddies that you're all about open source, without ever having to recompile anything's kernel!

Tagged as: EReader, Nook