The Nook, Superficially Reviewed

Although I am obsessed with eBook readers (hereafter “ereaders”; likewise, “ebooks”, “epaper”, “efotainment”, etc.) and have wanted to have one since the first Kindle was announced, I’ve spent the entire time since then vacillating between models, complaining about the prices, and drooling over unreleased models (both officially announced and rumored devices). In that time I’ve probably spent $300 on boring old printed books, so with the recent ereader price wars I decided to get in the game with Barnes & Noble’s cheapest model, the new wifi-only Nook. I ordered it on Monday and it arrived, impressively, on Tuesday. I haven’t spent much time using it yet — half an hour yesterday and about half an hour this morning — but I’ve already formed some concrete opinions on the device. They follow.

1. Size/weight/holdability: Good-to-very-good. It weighs about as much as a paperback (though not a novella), and has about the same height/width. It is, of course, much thinner — if it were any thinner, in fact, I think it would be difficult to hold. The back has a soft matte plastic that I find pleasing enough. Basically, no complaints regarding this device’s dimensions, shape, or materials.
2. Durability: I haven’t bought a case yet, and am still not sure whether I want to. It seems sturdy enough, and I’d rather avoid adding size/weight. But I also don’t want to break it. This is an area in which I would appreciate the advice of knowledgeable parties.
3. Wifi: it has wifi. It works.
4. epaper screen: I like it. I’d always opt for higher resolution and color and a backlight and all that jazz, but really, this screen is pretty decent. It’s easy on the eyes and has a high enough resolution to get a lot of text on each screen (if you use the extra-small font, which to my eyes looks to be about the same as the text in a trade paperback). That said, I do think it would be nice if the screen were just a little bit bigger (it’s 6” diagonal — 7” would be pretty awesome).
5. Page-counter: At the bottom of the screen there’s a counter to tell you how far you’ve gotten in the book (e.g, 14/474). I took this to mean how many pages through the book I am, but it’s not exactly that — at least, it’s not how many NOOK pages through the book I am. Maybe it tracks the print version of the book, I’m not sure, but sometimes it doesn’t increase when I turn to the next page on the reader. I don’t know if this is standard for ebook readers, but it’s kind of odd to advance a page on the screen but have it register as continuing on the same page on the counter. Not a deal breaker or anything but odd.
6. Screen refresh time: not annoying for flipping pages (now that I have maximized the number of words/page, the brief interval doesn’t feel like a big deal), but a bit annoying for menus, etc. For example, you start each book on the cover page, then there’s the title page, then there’s the table of contents, etc. Getting from the cover page to the first page of actual text is a bit tedious. Certainly not a big deal but noticeable.
7. Lack of touchscreen on epaper screen: another navigation frustration. You have to use the touchscreen below the main screen to navigate, including selecting stuff on the main screen. It’s a bit counterintuitive once you’re used to touchscreen devices (iPhone, iPad, Android, etc.)
8. Highlighting/notes: I never really highlighted or annotated my print books (aside from school stuff), and I don’t think I’m going to change that now. But if I wanted to, I suspect this is another place where I would miss a touchscreen. The interface for selecting text is very kludgy. As for notes, that requires the little touchscreen keyboard, which brings me to…
9. The little touchscreen keyboard: adequate. Not great. Don’t think I’ll be using it much, so it doesn’t really matter, but there’s a big “clear” button that’s right below the “m” button, and I’ve already accidentally hit it and had to retype everything. A touch annoying.
10. Search: You can search within a book’s text. This strikes me as a feature I’ll almost never take advantage of, but one that will be incredibly useful when I do. (See also: built-in dictionary.)
11. Web browser: haven’t even tried it. Can’t imagine using it as long as my Droid’s on — the bigger screen doesn’t come close to compensating for the lack of color, the slow refresh time, the lack of touchscreen, and a million other things. So without actually investigating I’m pretty sure this feature doesn’t matter at all (and to B&N’s credit, they’ve never suggested otherwise).
12. Book Store: I haven’t used this much yet but it seems like it would be dead easy to look up a particular book and buy it (the reader is linked to my B&N account, so purchases are quick and painless until my credit card bill arrives). And B&N, of course, has a huge library of available books, so I expect that most anything I want to read is gettable.
13. Public domain books: all those free books they crow about on the Nook page on their website are not that easy to find. Or rather, browsing through for free books seems impossible — if you search for a particular public domain book it comes up (along with, and usually listed after, a bunch of other editions you have to pay for), but there’s no “Free Books” category to idly page through. That’s true on the Nook but, at least as importantly, it’s also true on B&N’s ebook web store, and it’s really kind of annoying.
    • Note: this may not be actually true — there may be a way to do this — but it’s sufficiently non-obvious that I couldn’t figure it out. That suggests that they aren’t exactly going out of their way to promote their free offerings, which is understandable from a business perspective but frustrating from a “I just spent a bunch of money on this device and now I want to download some free books” perspective.
14. Book pricing: I don’t know, it seems… okay? Books seem to range from free to $15 or so, and anywhere on that spectrum strikes me as fairly reasonable. It would be nice, of course, if everything were cheaper, but I guess I’m fine with this.
15. Naming the device: you can name your Nook and the name will appear at the top of the main menu page. I am currently taking nominations for my Nook’s name (current top choice: The Cornballer).
16. Reading on an electronic device in public: still feels kind of weird! And I think it will remain so for a while. Despite my obsession with technology, I really don’t enjoy making a spectacle of myself using it, so I’m hoping this dies down (and I think the iPad’s popularity should help with this). In the mean time I feel very conspicuous when I pull the reader out of my manpurse. But maybe I just feel conspicuous because of the manpurse.
17. Clients for other platforms: you can download Nook software for iOS devices, Blackberries, Macs, and PCs. But, alas, you can’t yet download Nook software for Android. This is kind of funny since the actual Nook runs Android (albeit a heavily-modified version customized for the ereader hardware). At any rate, it means that I can’t yet read a book on the Nook, turn it off, and pick it back up on my Droid. Truth be told that doesn’t strike me as a common use case (I tend to use the Droid for shorter-burst reading — blog posts, news, etc.), but considering I could do it if I had a Kindle I think B&N needs to step up here and offer the same functionality.

Overall opinion: If you read a lot and don’t feel a pathological need to collect physical books (note: I’m still struggling with the latter), for $150 it’s hard to argue with the Nook. It’s not perfect, and there’s certainly room for improvement, but I’m quite happy with it so far and look forward to spending the holiday weekend putting it through its paces. That said, I’m not convinced that it’s meaningfully better (or worse) than the Kindle — and for all I know you could put the various other ereaders on the market in that category as well. Which is pretty great news for us all — you can’t really go wrong with any of them.^* And I expect that we’re in for an exciting few years on the ereader front, with better prices and better features continuously rolling out. Which means, among other things, that in a year I’ll probably be writing a post titled “Why the [new thing I bought] Makes the Nook Look Like a Total Loser”.

^* Although it’s worth noting for the record that if you’re worried about being locked into one platform or another, it actually is kind of a big deal which one you choose. As far as I can tell without doing any actual research, the books you buy for Nook won’t work on other ereaders; same with Kindle; same with Apple’s iBook format. I believe you can buy ePub formatted books from other vendors, which should work on at least most ereaders, but suffice it to say that it adds another layer of complexity to the transaction and I’m unlikely to bother with it. So if you buy a Nook and use it a lot you may be committing yourself to a long-term relationship.