Why I Am Not Buying Barnes & Nobles’ Nook

Posted on December 13, 2009 by Bruce Keener

I have not even seen one myself, but my friend Judie Lipsett has convinced me to not bother getting a Nook. Her article, How I completely wasted my Saturday on a piece of over-hyped software, is a damning indictment of an e-reader that should not have been released until its numerous bugs were worked out.

It’s a shame that the Nook is not ready for prime time. Like Judie, I have a ton of e-books (though not as many as her), and would enjoy having an optimum e-reading device for them. My Kindle, version 1.2, is okay, but I am not a big fan of e-ink displays, and wind up reading most of my Kindle books on my iPhone. (By the way, Amazon, way to go on not upgrading the 1.x versions of Kindle to read PDFs … your lack of support for your early adopters is duly noted.)

I am hopeful that the rumored Apple tablet, iPad, will be the e-reader I have been hoping for. In the interim, I guess I’ll stick with the iPhone.

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  • http://kindleworld.blogspot.com Andrys

    Bruce, apologies. Let’s try that again. (If you can, delete my first reply with the typos thanks. I expanded on it a bit too.)

    I still have the Kindle 1 as well as the Kindle 2.
    There is quite good reason for not updating Kindle 1 for native PDF support.

    The Kindle 1 is the only reader, of those having annotation/search/dictionary capabilities, that doesn’t allow the user to access a WORD directly but makes you deal with a row of words at a time and then serves up several pop-up boxes to choose from the 4 or 5 words included in the selected row. This is why i went to the Kindle 2 right away.

    The K1 used an e-Ink 4-gray-levels screen that was extremely slow in display-refresh, which was why direct word-access was not direct — and PDF displays need more than any of this. The Kindle 2 has 16 levels and a much faster display which allows the cursor to be taken to a specific word and then the dictionary summary for that word to be displayed at the bottom.

    PDFs demand a lot of user-patience even with faster e-readers, especially with any photos included (most). With the truly slow refresh-rate of the Kindle 1, eftorts to load and read PDFs on it would have caused mainly frustration.

    Add that the Kindle 1 unit has much lower storage/memory capability.

    – Andrys
    kindleworld.blogspot.com

    • http://www.keenerliving.com/ Bruce Keener

      Hi Andrys,
      Thanks for the technical enlightenment on that. Good points. Perhaps I should upgrade to a Kindle 2, but for now most of my reading is done on the iPhone, using the Kindle App, anyway.

      Thanks also for the link to your site.

  • http://kindleworld.blogspot.com Andrys

    Bruce, thanks very much for letting me know what you thought. No need to upgrade when you’ve been happy with what you have – it does the basic job well, and a lot of people actually prefer reading with the iPhone app.

    I kept my Kindle 1 so I could loan it out when someone wants to read a book (and in case I want to try functions for the blog.

    I just discovered your blog. Love your entries – and our reaction to the news is pretty similar. Will bookmark it and follow you on Twitter. By the way, Seth Grodin’s book looks interesting – I often wonder about the same thing but that fluctuates with my gratitude for realizing I will likely never be bored again, well not much :-) Balancing gazing into these screens with actual human contact is definitely important though and sometimes that gets shortshifted too easily.

    Re the PDF to ePub – see
    http://www.lexcycle.com/faq/how_to_create_epub
    They themselves recommend Calibre (another terrific program) over their own Stanza for this.

    Re the FakeSteve thing, normally, abusive rants don’t appeal to me, but I found this one totally hilarious. That NYT article on the AT&T problem possibly lying with iPhone functioning was really interesting. I’m near San Francisco so was not going to go AT&T and have not bought an iPhone for that reason. Verizon is very good here, but if the iPhone affects them the same way … We’ll see. Am interested in the Motorola Droid too.

    Well, don’t mean to run on and on. So, take care. Will be reading you.

    • http://www.keenerliving.com/ Bruce Keener

      Andrys,
      Thank you for the compliments, comments, and link to a discussion on ePub conversion. I’ll follow through on the links (including the one in your following comment).

      Thank you very much!

  • http://kindleworld.blogspot.com Andrys

    Final thought! This is supplemental to the first link re PDFs to ePub:

    http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=62770