We are very pleased to announce that Focus Home Interactive will publish “A Game of Thrones: Genesis”, Cyanide’s new strategy game, adapted from George R.R. Martin’s famous series of best-sellers novels “A Song of Ice and Fire”.

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“A Game of Thrones: Genesis” plunges you into the heart of the battles and intrigues between the Families that shaped the Kingdom of Westeros.

A realtime strategy game with all your favorite characters? Sign me up. I have a sneaking suspicion that “Genesis” will mean that any sort of single player campaign will not revolve around the actual stories themselves, but the happenings that led to them. If that’s the case, it might be a little bummer, but so long as I get to stomp some Lannisters, I will be ok.

Full Press Release.

But this is about reading speeds and satisfaction. How do all of these things stack up?

Conducted with 24 users, the study attempted to find out if reading on the iPad, Kindle, or PC were any faster than simply reading a book. Given a select work from Hemingway (yikes), each participant was told to read the words and attempt to remember what they actually said. A short exam was given afterwards for comprehension’s sake and to make sure that no one just skimmed the pages. The results show that both the iPad and the Kindle clocked in at slower speeds than normal, every day, boring, non-flashy, no-buttony books. The raw numbers say that the iPad averages roughly 6% slower and Kindles 11% slower than books. So that iPad you just bought? Burn it. BURN IT AT THE STAKE.

Or not. The other side of this coin basically says that while books are sooo great for reading and sooo fast (actually, they say there’s not that much difference among the devices in regards to speed, even with those percentages), people are generally more satisfied with their techy counterparts. Whether that’s because the sheer guilt of buying a $200-$800 thinger for reading or not remains to be seen. Interestingly enough, the iPad, Kindle, and regular old crappy book scored nearly the same with users, with the iPad and Kindle just a tiny bit ahead. Everyone hates reading on the PC, though, but we didn’t need a test to prove that.

Check out the full report here.

The number of words displayed on a nook page is not the same amount of words that would be in a physical book’s page. Look at The God Delusion, for example. The paper versions (hardback and paperback) range from 416 to 464 pages, respectively. The nook’s version lists a solid 433. I say a “solid 433″ because no matter how you change the font or change the size of the font, the final page tally on the nook never changes. That may very well be the answer to my riddle, as a larger font, for example, would invariably require more page turns to equal the same amount of words read that a “normal” sized font would display. Going the other direction: I generally keep my nook on the “very small” font setting, and my current novel has no trouble keeping up with pages. They are one-for-one, so to speak. Yet a similar sized font in another book can give you a two-for-one. All very peculiar.

I find it interesting that the device would have you turn several pages to equal one full numbered page. Would it not be easier to simply recount the number of pages? Well, it may not, actually. If you change a font size, there’s a ton of text between page 1 and page 500 for the device to process to figure out that it now only takes 400 clicks to read through. On that front, having additional page turns makes sense, although how does it still know that to get to the next page, I’ll need to push the button twice? There is some counting going on inside of there regardless of the situation. Maybe it just fudges the numbers and thinks to itself “Well, I think that it’ll be X amount of pages. As I get closer to the end I’ll make sure the book still ends on page 500…”

This whole situation is possibly why there is no option to easily go to a direct page. You can add bookmarks to pages which essentially does this task, but not retroactively. If you finish a novel and for some reason remember a quote you wanted from a certain page, you can’t just search for page 200, you have to find the chapter and then turn pages until to get to what you want. Not a huge gripe (you should have bookmarked and noted that page to begin with), but interesting to think about.

Being one, and I think the only person I know, who likes to keep tabs on the total pages I read (I have a spreadsheet and everything!), I wish there was a better way for the nook to more accurately display accurate page numbers. In the end, when writing down page numbers for my spreadsheet, I generally just write down what page number the nook displays, so it really isn’t a huge hassle. I would just like to understand the methodology behind how the device counts the pages.

Now the question turns to you. If you’ve had experience with other ebook readers (Kindle, Sony Reader, iPad), do they do the same thing?

Speed reading is the art of silencing subvocalization. Most readers have an average reading speed of 200 wpm, which is about as fast as they can read a passage out loud. This is no coincidence. It is their inner voice that paces through the text that keeps them from achieving higher reading speeds. They can only read as fast as they can speak because that’s the way they were taught to read, through reading systems like Hooked on Phonics.

However, it is entirely possible to read at a much greater speed, with much better reading comprehension, through silencing this inner voice. The solution is simple – absorb reading material faster than that inner voice can keep up.

It’s about as simple as that. Basically what happens is the program flashes single words or two at a time at a speed that you set. The words fly by so fast that you really don’t have time to internally “read” them, you more or less absorb them. To read the passage, you have to focus twice as hard to keep up with the speed, so at the same time your comprehension generally improves. I have attempted a few passages myself using the service and even in that short amount of time I feel like I have improved my reading speed.

What’s the fastest you’ve reached without being overwhelmed?

Today I was stumbling here and there, down some stairs, Bananas in Pajamas-style, when I came across this list from what could only be some sort of bloggy thing from Random House. The page in question is entitled Modern Library. Research has yet to lead me to any results regarding the nature of the site, but I did find a “Cart” link so I assume they are trying to sell you something. Be that as it may, they do have a very interesting list of books in this post. What kind of books? Just the 100 BEST BOOKS, durr.

The list is broken down into two columns, the “Board’s List” and the “Reader’s List.” In all it is really 200 books, but we will let that slide.

For me, personally, I have read fewer of these novels than I probably should have. Although, to be fair, a lot of these seem to be general high school reading that most people were subjected to but I wasn’t. I learned a lot in my senior English class in high school, but there are only a couple of books on either list that I had to read for class. Luckily, “best” and “important for critical thinking” are two different things, so we won’t dwell on this much. We got to read Beowulf, so yeah, take that.

On the “Board’s List,” I have read five titles:

• The Great Gatsby
• Catch-22
• Slaughterhouse-Five: A Novel
• The Secret Agent
• The Catcher in the Rye

For the “Reader’s List,” I have knocked out nine:

• To Kill a Mockingbird
• Catch-22
• The Great Gatsby
• The Catcher in the Rye
• Slaughterhouse-Five: A Novel
• A Prayer for Owen Meany
• The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
• Ender’s Game
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

Although I have read more on the Reader’s List, that doesn’t really mean a whole lot. It’s obviously just a popularity contest there. I actually have my doubts about the validity of the choices for the Reader’s List when the second book – book number two – is Battlefield Earth. Seriously?

So how many novels on these lists have you read? Can you top my epic NINE? Come on, try it. I dare you.

As discussed the other day, the Barnes & Noble nook has received a new software update via some sort of fantastical voodoo otherwise known as wifi. I’ve had a couple of days to play with the new features. Let’s make some arbitrary observations on how good or bad they are.

Speed Increase

One of the first things you’ll notice with the new update is that pretty much everything across the board is a little snappier, from the UI to page turns.

The touch screen now seems more responsive to input. In the past, for example, scrolling up and down through the menus could be a bit of a chore. If you wanted to get the bottom of the menu and you flicked to do so, a lot of the time the screen would not register what you wanted to do, scrolling down instead just a couple of menu items and halting in a jarring manner. Now everything is tighter, with one quick flick getting you were you want to go.

Opening books and page turns have been improved as well. Opening new books has received a slight increase on the Percept-o-meter; the “Opening your book” dialogue that shows up goes away in a timely manner. Simply turning pages feels much better. As soon as you click something is happening. That something usually is page turn. Before, on some books, turning a page could take a couple of seconds sometimes, usually when the next page was an illustration or a new chapter. As of now those things have disappeared, and that is nice.

Also, since I have nowhere else to put this bit of info, when looking up words in the dictionary, you now have the option to type in the word instead of scrolling. This greatly speeds up looking for words.

Games

With the update has come new software. The first we’ll talk about are the games. Only two – Sudoku and Chess – show up with the update but there are quite a few more that I can think of that’d work; pretty much any “simple” board game. Othello, Checkers, Go. Any of those could work.

I had my doubts when I heard that these games would appear. E-Ink is not famed for quick enough refresh rates to accommodate “fast” things. For whatever reason my mind lingered on the Kindle with its one screen. I felt like playing anything on it would be an absolute chore. It turns out the nook has two screens, a fact I might have noticed after two months.

The games actually work really well. The E-Ink display shows the entire board while the touch screen shows roughly a third of it. You simply scroll to the square (in Sudoku) or area of board (in Chess), tap it, and input your number or move. It all works much faster than you’d think and is a nice diversion for when you don’t feel like reading.

Browser

Some other software that was included is a web browser. It’s labeled as being in beta, and it is. Like the games, it uses both screens to view the content and that helps it from not sucking like it would with a one screen only option.

The bottom screen also allows pages to be viewed in color, so you can actually view pictures, at least portions of them. Additionally, you can scroll with either the touch screen or the hard buttons. The left hand buttons go up and down the page and the right side moves the page left and right. It all works pretty well.

It all works well, it is true, but is it worth it to use it? Realistically only in a pinch. If you have a modern cell phone, the browsing on it will be better. It just will be. Additionally, you can probably browse anywhere. The nook can only browse when you’re connected to wifi, which I’m sure is a trade off of never having to pay for the 3G service. The keyboard on your phone will undoubtedly be faster to type on, as well.

With all of that said, though, most mobile pages render pretty well on the device and you’ll see them on a larger screen than that of a cell phone, which is kind of fun. It feels like you just won’t find too many instances where you will really use the browser, given all the limitations.

In Store Browsing

The last big, and arguably most important, feature that B&N has included with the update is the ability to go to a brick and mortar B&N and read nearly any ebook while within their walls for up to an hour. Unfortunately, I haven’t had a chance to try this feature out, so there’s not a lot that I can write. It is, however, a really interesting idea that gives nook a leg up on its direct competitors. It’s something they will assuredly promote.

Wrap Up

I was fortunate to get my nook right before they released their second big update. I only had to use the original software for a short period of time; I didn’t get to become familiar with any of its idiosyncrasies. Then 1.2 came and for all intents and purposes fixed a lot of the problems people complained about. 1.3, with its speed increases and extra features, should make much of the complaints disappear. It’s not perfect, but nothing is, and if B&N can continue to roll out updates like this I will still continue to really like my nook.

It may come as no surprise that we (read: I) are excited for the newest version of nook software to roll out. I have had mine for around two months and really enjoy it. Today, Barnes & Noble released version 1.3 for its little e-reader that could. Let’s see what they’ve done.

According to the B & N eReader blog, 1.3 brings a few interesting features. Take note, though, that this update (it’s around 64mb) will not be pushed over 3G; you will have to either side-mount the update or download it over wifi.

1. Better wifi connectivity – Your nook should now be able to sniff out more signals.
2. A WEB BROWSER – It’s listed as being in beta right now, and as of this writing I have not seen it in action, but it’s a very interesting addition that is surely pointed directly at the competition. You will need to be connected to wifi in order to surf, however.
3. Games – Now featured are both Sudoku and Chess. I don’t know, personally, how much use I will get from these but I loves me some Sudoku so BRING IT ON.
4. Faster Page Turns – Self explanatory, but they also list quicker times for opening books as well.
5. Read Full Books in Stores – You can now go to any B&N brick & mortar store and read complete ebooks for free for up to an hour. They are also going to be rolling out periodicals soon as well.

That’s pretty much the rundown. My nook is currently updating as we speak (we’re not speaking right now, in all honesty). We’ll have an update on how great 1.3 is soon. I say “great” only in that mine just restarted and the bottom menu has changed for the awesome.

You can download the update here.

So it has been one full week with my nook, and how does it stack up? Are books in paper form dead? Well, I don’t think so, but we’re getting to the point where they’re becoming less…necessary.

First, let’s begin with some product design. As reported earlier this week, I received the nook – the name is not capitalized – as a gift for Christmas. Barnes & Noble did not account for the demand of their new product, and as such I was stuck high and dry for two months waiting on mine to arrive. (Through various sources – i.e. someone who bought one this week – they are now shipping at an expedient rate.) The device comes in interesting packaging, housed in a thick, clear plastic container that displays the nook like it was an artifact dug from Tutankhamun’s tomb (I’m sure Howard Carter would have loved to find this thing in there; Lord Carnarvan, not so much). Once inside, the nook comes out with some effort, and you will find a USB cable that can be used to plug it into your PC or to the included wall charger. The unit also has a headphone port for listening to MP3′s/audiobooks/whatever and a pair of speakers on the bottom. I have yet to play any audio through the speakers, so I cannot attest to how good they are. But enough of all of the stuff that was covered in the video, how does it feel?

Two Screens

The nook itself weighs but 12.1 ounces (according to its website) and feels essentially like holding any standard sized novel in terms of weight. On either side of the unit are two buttons to page back and forth, as you’d assume (Protip: you can also turn pages with finger swipes on the touchscreen). The bottom fourth or so, however, is made up of a touch screen that is used for selecting and options. All input to the device outside of the page turning is done through the touch screen. The thing that one might notice is that at first the screen feels like it is not going at the clip you might want. After several days of using it, I have determined that it comes down to two things: the nature of e-ink displays and most of us having used “quicker” touch-screens in other devices. What we have to get over at first is the refresh rate of the e-ink display. When you turn the page, the device “rewrites” the content on the screen and then ostensibly shuts down. What is great about the technology is that once something is displayed on the screen, it needs no further power to display it, it’s printed there until the next instance that you turn a page or view a menu. What’s not as great about the technology is that this page turning takes a split second to occur; the device cannot change one little area of the screen, it has to cycle the entire screen to display new content. How this comes back to the touchscreen is that if you are trying to go down a menu list by pushing the arrows on the screen, the whole process might seem slow due to the refresh rate. I find that it is not the processor inside that is slow, it’s simply the way the technology works. For example, you want to select something on a menu that is five items down, you can press the down arrow five times, waiting each time to see it select each item as it goes, or you simply press the arrow five times in rapid succession and the screen refreshes once and gets to the item you want. The guts inside know what you want, the screen just has to catch up. I believe that may be where some of the remarks of it being “sluggish” have arisen; it’s just the way the technology is.

On the other item, the “quicker touch-screen devices”: I own an iPhone, many hundreds of thousands of people do too and have become accustomed to that sense of extremely quick screen movement and response from the screen. While the touchscreen on the nook does a very admirable job of going through menus efficiently, there is a subtle lag if you are assuming it will be as quick as that of an iPhone. You have to be slightly more deliberate in your presses. The nook’s touchscreen definitely uses a similar but not as sophisticated screen. If you take the iPhone out of the equation, it works just fine. There is an onscreen keyboard for typing in queries, and it, of course, doesn’t work as flawlessly as the iPhone, but after using it a bit this week I can say that it works well, so long as you keep in mind that the guts of the machine is keeping up with you and you just need to wait on the screen to refresh.

Buy It Up

Purchasing novels on the device is simple enough. You’ll have to create a Barnes & Noble account, but once you do everything runs smoothly enough. When I heard that mine had shipped, I made an account online and put some ebooks in a wishlist so that I could remember them. Turning on the device for the first time, I was asked to input my B&N account info, and once the product was synced to my account, it auto downloaded that wish list and I had purchased my first novel in a matter of minutes. Like the Kindle, who we had advertised on this very page for some time, the nook uses 3G cellphone magic to connect to the B&N store from anywhere in addition to WiFi; you should hardly ever be in a position where you can’t search and download new books. To save on battery life, the 3G does not seem to be on at all times, it kicks on when needed. When going to the shop, it may take a few seconds as it re-establishes a connection, but it hasn’t been too bad in the time that I’ve experimented with it. I’m eager to see how it’ll fair in other places than where I currently live, though.

Like other ebook readers, you have the ability to access some newspapers and magazines too; at this time I unfortunately haven’t had the chance to try those out, so I will not speak of them in this review. Conceivably, on the “home” screen for the device, if one goes to the “Daily” section, all of these publications would automagically be located there for your consumption. One interesting feature of the “Daily” section is the inclusion of a couple of B&N blogs that show up every couple of days. There are two by default, it seems, one by a fellow names Teddy Wayne who writes a subsection of barnesandnoblereview.com called Grin & Tonic, and the other by a little known author named Stephen King, who writes for Today in Literature. King’s posts are somewhat self explanatory considering the site he’s writing for. I am not sure how these two have made their way onto the device (other than one working for B&N and the other is holy-shit Stephen King), but I really would like to be able add more blog-esque daily updates like these. They’re both generally interesting to read and a great diversion from reading just books.

Expandability

Unlike the Kindle, nook offers you the ability to add storage the device. The back cover comes off and you can add a microSD card if you happen to use up the 2GB of onboard storage. Additionally, if think your battery is dumb and you want another, you can replace it yourself. Shazaam!

Something Wrong?

Every ray of sunshine does cast a shadow, however, and the nook is not without its faults. I haven’t found a whole lot to be negative about the device but two things do stand out. The first is battery life. The official website says this:

Read for days. You can read for up to ten days without recharging with wireless off.

I don’t know if that’s wholly true; in fact I’m pretty sure it’s not. Currently I’ve nearly read one full book and as I type this I am putting the device on the charger for the third time this week (that’s including the initial charge after opening the box, so really it’s the second time). I’m pretty sure it’s not the e-ink display (which looks fantastic, by the way, I haven’t even mentioned that yet) that’s rocking the battery, but the bright, colorful touchscreen. It’s a blessing and a curse; you want the cool touchscreen, but the batteries do drain quicker because of it. Am I let down that it’s not “ten days?” A little, but in terms of the main things I recharge in a week, my laptop gets 2 hours (or less) and my iPhone gets one full day before desperately needing a charge. My nook is king of things that don’t need charging in my house. Granted, I have been using it a TON this week since it’s all new and shiny, so that may have something to do with it, but what I am seeing is still less than half of what is advertised.

The only other issue I’ve come across is that on a couple of occasions on this first novel that I’ve purchased, leaving the novel and coming back has a couple of times forgotten where I had left off. Once, for example, while I was on page 150 or so, I left to go do something else on the device and came back to it being on page 88. The device allows you to set plenty of bookmarks, and every time I have done that and left nothing poor has occurred, but I think they need to probably just transform and roll out with an update. I’m sure there’s just a bug in there somewhere. Speaking of page numbers, this first novel (Tokyo Vice for the curious) has odd page numberings, and that may have something to do with the device not always remembering. There are instances I’ve noticed where I will turn the page and the page counter doesn’t go up, but on a second turn it acts correctly and continues on. The content changes, just not the page number. The second book I’ve read into (Freakonomics) hasn’t shown any of this. I’ve read about fifty pages into that and it’s keeping up just fine. It seems to be just a coding error in that one particular book, but I can’t say for sure as I haven’t had extensive time with the device and multiple novels.

Books vs. eBooks

So the big money question right now is: “Do I need one?” This particular query had me stumped for some time. I love reading books; you could go so far as to say I co-host a show about them, so the idea of taking the physical paper out of my hands was something that for the last couple of years during Kindle’s rise I never quite grasped. The new-book smell, the visual cue of your progress, the covers; all of these things I enjoy greatly. I’m proud to say since starting the show in 2007 I’ve read nearly 40 novels, and they all sit on my shelf looking badass. What pushed me over the edge to wanting an ebook reader was not only the fact that I think it’d be cool to talk about them on the show, but that my bookshelves are now full and there’s no more room at the inn. I needed an alternative, and the nook came out of nowhere looking all badass so I had to get it (or receive it as a gift, whichever the case may be).

In the week that I have had the device, I can say that it may not replace the physical book for me (there are just some things I NEED TO HOLD), but it damn well comes close. The screen, which I’ve hardly mentioned, looks great and doesn’t burn out your eyes because it’s not backlit. The nook is about the weight of a general paperback – actually about the weight of Neil Stepheson’s Quicksilver – so holding it is not a pain. In fact, since it’s a solid unit, holding it actually easier than keeping up with, say, Quicksilver, which is 950 pages. I spend most of my time holding my nook in one hand, very casually and it feels great. There’s no fuss with pages flopping down or wind flipping them around. Currently, I’m juggling books on my nook and George R.R. Martin’s A Feast for Crows in hardback, a 750 page-er, and my weak little man arms get tired quickly from holding that tome. The nook is just more convenient.

Will you need a nook? That’s hard to say. Luckily, unlike the Kindle, Barnes & Noble stores have kiosks where you can go and play with the nook at your leisure. Go try it out first, by all means. It may fit with your lifestyle and it may not, but if you’ve gotten this far into this review then I just want you to know that it definitely is a very solid machine.

The Last Bits

Well friend, you and I have gone on a long journey through 2200 words of nook review. It has now come to a close. At the end of the day, I enjoy my nook. It is not without its idiosyncrasies, but if you are in the market for an eBook reader, I can whole heartedly suggest the device. Just make sure you also pick up a case; you don’t want your new toy to get scuffled up.

The nook currently retails for $259. You can find more information on Barnes & Nobles’s website.

“Why oh why would you ask us to take part in such crimes against nature?” you ask. Well, I can’t really do it justice, so you’ll just have to read it yourself, but the guys over at Chud.com have a great understanding on why there needs to be a fourth Twilight film. A quote:

Breaking Dawn opens with Bella Swan, the lacteal heroine of the series, finally getting married to Edward Cullen, the mopey vampire hero. They go off to honeymoon on Isle Esme, a Brazilian island the Cullen clan owns (this is already ridiculous beyond belief. Imagine a vampire going snorkeling; it basically happens in this book), and Edward is afraid to fuck his new bride. The reason: he’s super strong and she’s just a human – Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex type of situation here. But Bella wears him down and Edward throws it in her – and knocks her the fuck out, leaving her badly bruised.

Let’s go over that again: Edward fucks Bella into unconsciousness. This alone should have you running to Fandango to pre-order your tickets, but it only gets better.

Head over to Chud for the full article.

So not too long ago I may or may not have written a fairly gushing preview of the Barnes & Noble Nook, a portable E-Reader machine that has a color touchscreen that sits along the bottom. I mean, really, it does look sexy. Look at that thing. Who wouldn’t want one? How it could it be anything less than pure awesome? As it gets closer and closer to its debut, review copies have now been sent around, and Engadget has weighed in. Here’s a snippet:

Throughout our testing with the Nook we vacillated between being completely charmed by the aesthetics of the reader, and completely frustrated by the way it actually works.

Oh my. Head over to Engadget for their full review.