It’s finally happened. After just four years in the mainstream market, it looks like these little electronic, non-tangible books we like to read on our Kindles have finally surpassed that of smelly, old, paper ones, at least, according to Amazon.

SEATTLE, May 19, 2011 (BUSINESS WIRE) — (NASDAQ:AMZN)–Amazon began selling hardcover and paperback books in July 1995. Twelve years later in November 2007, Amazon introduced the revolutionary Kindle and began selling Kindle books. By July 2010, Kindle book sales had surpassed hardcover book sales, and six months later, Kindle books overtook paperback books to become the most popular format on Amazon.com. Today, less than four years after introducing Kindle books, Amazon.com customers are now purchasing more Kindle books than all print books – hardcover and paperback – combined.

These words come from a recent press release by the thieves of money themselves. It goes on to say that soon they will own your soul, as well. THEN it goes on to clarify: “Since April 1, for every 100 print books Amazon.com has sold, it has sold 105 Kindle books.” Fine, Amazon, we get it, you make money. Now just tell me the next time you have a $20 coupon for pre-ordering a video game because I CANNOT STOP BUYING THOSE.

I would like to hear if Barnes & Noble is experiencing a similar growth pattern with their digital books. Although the NOOK is popular, it surely isn’t Kindle popular, and having actual stores to shop in probably still skews the numbers in favor of print.

Regardless of all of the above, I will still be buying A Dance with Dragons in hardback. Suck on that, NOOK and Kindle!

Earlier this morning, B&N held a short and sweet conference discussing this new device that supports a touch screen interface and a two month battery life. Two months?! That’s almost as long as the infinite battery life of actual books.

As a result of the whole thing being finger friendly, gone is the lower touchscreen display of the original NOOK. The device shown today came in a matte black finish and might be a little square for my tastes, but its super tiny form factor is perfect for reading and hating anything by Charles Dickens.

From the NOOK Color comes “NOOK Friends,” a way to keep up with your buddies on what they are reading and make recommendations like: “Hey, I noticed you are reading Twilight. I’m sorry, but I can’t speak to you anymore.” You apparently can also use the Tweeter and Bookface to inform your friends that you are boycotting Dan Brown because The Da Vinci Code is sacrilege and you don’t understand how fiction works. With a more responsive and less “laggy” screen, inputting text will hopefully make all of this much easier than before.

The device should be available to pre-order today for $139 and is supposed to ship around June 10th, right after you are trying to digest all of the awesome things that just happened at E3.

PRESS RELEASE AHOY:

Barnes & Noble Introduces The All-New NOOK™, The Simple Touch Reader™

Best Battery Life Ever – Up to an Incredible Two Months on a Single Charge

Ultra-Light and Compact for Optimal Portability, Lighter than a Paperback

Full Touchscreen with E Ink® Pearl Display Technology for Reading Anywhere

Optimized Display Performance Offers 80 Percent Less Flashing
than Any Other eReader for the Most Immersive Reading Experience

The Most Intuitive, Easy-to-Use eReader for Everyone

Barnes & Noble Expert Recommendations,

Plus the Most Social Reading Experience with NOOK Friends™

Pre-Order for $139 in Time for Father’s Day and Summer Reading

NEW YORK–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Barnes & Noble, Inc. (NYSE: BKS), the world’s largest bookseller, today expanded its bestselling digital reading offering with the All-New NOOK, The Simple Touch Reader. With a full touchscreen, NOOK™ features record-setting, extra-long battery life on the easiest-to-use, ultra-light, portable 6-inch eReader with the most-advanced E Ink Pearl display, and the world’s largest bookstore available by Wi-Fi®. Now available for pre-order at www.nook.com and at Barnes & Noble stores for just $139, NOOK will begin shipping on or about June 10. Barnes & Noble adds the All-New NOOK, a significant leap forward in the dedicated eReader category, to a product line that includes the bestselling NOOK Color™, the only Reader’s Tablet™. Based on the success of the NOOK product line, combined with focus on the absolute best reading experience, Barnes & Noble now claims more than 25 percent of the digital book market – just 18 months after launching NOOK 1st Edition™.

“We set out to design the easiest-to-use, most optimized, dedicated reading device ever created and accomplished it with the All-New NOOK”

Barnes & Noble has always recognized the simplicity and ease that the element of touch brings to its NOOK product line, and the All-New NOOK is no exception. With a simple tap to the 6-inch touchscreen, it’s intuitive and easy to navigate, shop and read. Customers can look up words, highlight passages, adjust the font size and style or search by typing on the responsive on-screen keyboard that appears only when a customer needs it. The paper-like E Ink display features crisp, clear text that’s great for reading anywhere, even in bright sunlight. The no-glare display offers 50 percent more contrast than NOOK 1st Edition.

At only 7.48 ounces (212 grams), the artfully designed All-New NOOK is lightweight and thin – 35 percent lighter and 15 percent thinner than NOOK Wi-Fi 1st Edition™. Lighter than a paperback, NOOK’s sleek but durable, compact design (6.5 inches high by 5 inches wide by 0.47 inches deep) makes it easy to fit in a jacket, pocket, purse or backpack, holding up to 1,000 digital books and more personal content using the expandable memory slot. Its ergonomic, contoured design with a soft-touch back makes it easy and comfortable to read, even with just one hand, and for extended periods of time. And thanks to best-in-class battery life, read for up to 2 months on a single charge with Wi-Fi off – that’s twice as long as the other leading eReader available.

Barnes & Noble’s use of the latest-generation E Ink screen and proprietary technology offers unmatched performance on the All-New NOOK, delivering a seamless and immersive reading experience. NOOK offers 80 percent less flashing than other eReaders – whether turning pages, browsing for books or scrolling through your library. Page turns are lightning fast, using the touchscreen or well-placed side buttons, and with the new Fast Page™ feature, just press and hold a side button to quickly scan through content and skip right to the desired section.

“We set out to design the easiest-to-use, most optimized, dedicated reading device ever created and accomplished it with the All-New NOOK,” said William Lynch, Chief Executive Officer of Barnes & Noble. “Touch makes it simple to use, and the beautifully compact design makes it the most portable eReader in its class. Add to that an unmatched battery life, the most advanced paper-like touch display on the market and wireless access to the world’s largest digital bookstore, and we believe that for readers of all ages, the All-New NOOK is the best eReader on the market, and a great value at $139.”

The World’s Largest Bookstore in Your Pocket

With the All-New NOOK, customers can enjoy a wide variety of digital content, all at their fingertips. Shop for everything from new releases and current bestsellers to classics and more, all in a single search. The NOOK Bookstore™ offers one of the most expansive digital catalogs of more than two million books, magazines and newspapers. Enjoy helpful recommendations from Barnes & Noble’s experts, personalized based on customers’ favored authors and genres, to decide what to read next. Have more than 80 popular national and local market newspapers and magazines from the NOOK Newsstand™ automatically delivered to NOOK the moment they’re released, including The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and USA TODAY, as well as Forbes, Reader’s Digest, Discover, Fast Company and New York magazine. All periodicals are available for subscription with a 14-day free trial or via single copies.

Most NOOK Books™ are $9.99 or less, including most of The New York Times Bestsellers, plus there’s over a million free classics. Enjoy more than 100,000 titles from independent publishers and self-publishing authors using Barnes & Noble’s PubIt!™ digital publishing platform. Young readers will find more than 12,000 NOOK Kids™ chapter books in Barnes & Noble’s world’s largest collection of digital children’s content. Sample NOOK Book titles for free and download all content wirelessly over a Wi-Fi connection in just seconds.

When customers visit Barnes & Noble stores with their All-New NOOK, the shopping and reading experience gets even better. Connect to free and fast Wi-Fi and browse complete NOOK Books for free through the company’s innovative Read In Store™ program and get exclusive content and special promotions through the More In Store™ program. NOOK customers receive access at more than 24,000 AT&T Wi-Fi hotspots, as well as other personal and public hotspots to browse, buy and download new content wirelessly.

Get Social with NOOK Friends

Another way NOOK customers can learn more about great books is through NOOK Friends, an exciting social experience previously available only to NOOK Color customers. From the home page, customers can see book recommendations from friends. See what your friends have posted about their current read, swap recommendations, share reading status, favorite quotes, and much more. Through Twitter® and Facebook® integrations, right from their current book, customers can tweet the title they’re reading, post on their Facebook wall and see what their NOOK Friends “like” on Facebook. With Barnes & Noble’s exclusive LendMe® technology, you can also lend eligible books to your friends at no cost for 14 days, and see and request to borrow friends’ LendMe books.

And coming in the next few weeks, Barnes & Noble will offer a new custom website, mynook.com, where customers can get recommendations from Barnes & Noble expert booksellers and NOOK Friends, access their NOOK Library™, and manage their device.

Read Your Way

Customers can customize their All-New NOOK and reading experience to their liking. Choose from 7 font sizes and 6 font styles. NOOK owners can personalize their device with one of Barnes & Noble’s screen savers or transfer personal photos (JPG, PNG, BMP and GIF) to make NOOK their own, and choose from a complete line of exclusive, new NOOK accessories (www.nook.com/accessories) to show their style wherever they go. They can also create personalized My Shelves to organize their NOOK Library and group reading content similar to their bookcase.

Read Everywhere

A customer’s entire NOOK Library follows them wherever they go. They can also easily transfer personal EPUB and PDF files to their All-New NOOK device to read documents on the go using the 2GB internal memory or a microSD™ card. Since the All-New NOOK is built on Android™ Operating System 2.1 and uses Adobe technology, device owners can also borrow digital books from their local library, a feature Barnes & Noble has always offered to NOOK device customers. Customers can also read seamlessly, accessing their NOOK Library and sync the last page read across their NOOK devices and their favorite mobile and computing devices using Barnes & Noble’s free line of eReading software (www.bn.com/freenookapps).

Availability

The All-New NOOK can be pre-ordered for $139 today and is expected to begin shipping on or about June 10, making it the perfect gift for dads and grads, and a great addition for every book lover’s summer reading wish list. Experience the All-New NOOK at www.nook.com or at the NOOK Boutiques™ and displays in one of Barnes & Noble’s more than 700 bookstores. With The Barnes & Noble Promise™, the company offers unmatched customer support in neighborhood Barnes & Noble bookstores, as more than 40,000 booksellers across the country are ready to assist customers with setting up their NOOKs or choosing their next great read. The company also continues to provide award-winning customer service support via phone and email. The All-New NOOK will also be available beginning next month at Best Buy, Walmart, Staples and Books-A-Million, along with NOOK Color.

About NOOK™ from Barnes & Noble

Barnes & Noble’s NOOK brand of eReading products makes it easy to read what you love, anywhere you like™ with a fun, easy-to-use and immersive digital reading experience. With NOOK, customers gain access to Barnes & Noble’s expansive NOOK Bookstore™ of more than two million digital titles, and the ability to enjoy content across a wide array of popular devices. The award-winning NOOK Color™ Reader’s Tablet™, the best-value on the tablet market ($249), features a stunning 7-inch VividView™ Color Touchscreen to read all of the content you love, shop popular apps, connect via email, browse the Web and more. The All-New NOOK ($139), the Simple Touch Reader™, is the easiest-to-use 6-inch touch reader, with the longest battery life of any eReader. In Barnes & Noble stores, NOOK owners can access free Wi-Fi connectivity, enjoy the Read In Store™ feature to read NOOK Books™ for free, and the More In Store™ program, which offers free, exclusive content and special promotions. Barnes & Noble was the first company to offer digital lending for a wide selection of books through its LendMe® technology, available through NOOK eReading products. Find NOOK devices in Barnes & Noble stores and online at www.BN.com, as well as at Best Buy, Walmart, Staples and Books-A-Million.

In addition to NOOK devices, Barnes & Noble makes it easy for customers to enjoy any book, anytime, anywhere with its free line of NOOK software, available at www.bn.com/freenookapps. Customers can use Barnes & Noble’s free eReading software to access and read books from their personal Barnes & Noble digital library on devices including iPad™, iPhone®, iPod touch®, Android™ smartphones and tablets BlackBerry®, PC and Mac®. Lifetime Library™ helps ensure that Barnes & Noble customers will always be able to access their digital libraries on NOOK products and software-enabled devices and BN.com. Barnes & Noble also offers NOOK Study™ (www.nookstudy.com), an innovative study platform and software solution for higher education, NOOK Kids™ (www.nookkids.com), a collection of digital picture and chapter books for children, and NOOK Books en español™ (http://www.barnesandnoble.com/ebooksenespanol), the first-ever Spanish language digital bookstore in the United States.

For more information on NOOK devices and eReading software, updates, new NOOK Book releases, Free Friday™ NOOK Books and more, follow us on www.twitter.com/ebooksbn and www.facebook.com/nookbn.

ABOUT BARNES & NOBLE, INC.

Barnes & Noble, Inc. (NYSE:BKS), the world’s largest bookseller and a Fortune 500 company, operates 705 bookstores in 50 states. Barnes & Noble College Booksellers, LLC, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Barnes & Noble, also operates 636 college bookstores serving nearly 4 million students and faculty members at colleges and universities across the United States. Barnes & Noble conducts its online business through Barnes & Noble.com (www.bn.com), one of the Web’s largest e-commerce sites, which also features more than two million titles in its NOOK Bookstore™ (www.bn.com/ebooks). Through Barnes & Noble’s NOOK™ eReading product offering, customers can buy and read eBooks on the widest range of platforms, including NOOK eBook Readers, devices from partner companies, and hundreds of the most popular mobile and computing devices using free NOOK software.

General information on Barnes & Noble, Inc. can be obtained via the Internet by visiting the company’s corporate website: www.barnesandnobleinc.com.

I have owned a nook for nearly a year now and feel like my knowledge of all things eBookery is vast like the Sahara, or at least as vast as purchasing and reading a dozen books on the thing is. However vast that knowledge is, that’s pretty much what I have. In my time with the device, I have come to love quite a bit about it, but there are definitely still some shortcomings, I feel, with the medium itself.

From the image above you can start to piece together a little of my consternation. A couple of days ago, upon perusing Google’s new eBook service, I came across a free version of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. I had never read the story before (nor seen the movie because I am a charlatan), so a free copy of the book sounds just about the right price for something that would take just a couple of days to read.

After finishing that book (which is much more bloody than I had ever thought it might be), I sought to read more. I turns out there are fifteen novels in the Oz set. L. Frank Baum was a busy man, it would seem. One of the boons of eBooks is that sets like these are pretty readily available and easy to find. A quick search of “Oz” on my Nook produced quite a few versions of these books. And that is great. Having the ability to choose what I want is nice, but on occasion the end result isn’t all that positive.

With the remaining fourteen books in the Oz series, I had many options of which set to choose, all with slightly different price points. They were all ranked well enough, and to the conscientious observer the content cannot be drastically different, right? So I chose one (for a whopping $.99), and soon thereafter I had fifteen new books; mission complete. The only option next was to crack it open and see what was inside. Words! Glorious, glorious words! …And placeholders for images (see image above). What?

Most eReader devices today have the ability to display black & white images, so it should be a non-issue. This edition seems to simply be poorly put together, with these odd insertions letting me know that I was being gipped out of a picture. In the transferring process from printed edition to electronic edition, it looks like these image placeholders where left right in to muddle up your reading experience. And that’s really the crux of my pissy-ness.

I have a very minor qualm with spending one whole dollar on this edition that has these placeholders (if I had paid more, then there definitely would have been more issues), but the fact that they are selling them with these things inside that create a disjointed reading experience stirs my anger. Over time, such things can only make someone who wanted to buy electronic books wary of the whole process if the quality of those books are low. Granted, I am realistically only singling out ONE set in this post, but I am fairly certain that this type of thing isn’t localized to just this set. And, also, to be fair, all of the content is still contained inside. The books are complete; it is simply the counterproductive formatting that I take issue with.

My main hope is that as this medium evolves, those who decide to publish works to be read digitally will think about these kinds of things. A simple, “Oh, these words probably don’t need to be here. Let’s take them out for the sake of someone who might buy this book.” Basically, if there are no pictures, I don’t really need it tell me there are no pictures.

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?

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.

I might have lied the other day when I said I’d had the last word on the nook. There’s no last word, people; none. This weekend Barnes & Noble pushed out an update for our little book reader: software version 1.2.

Gizmodo has the full scoop on what was updated, but here are is the nitty gritty on what has changed:

• Enhanced in-store seamless connectivity to enjoy free Wi-Fi, with More In Store content promotions exclusively for Nook owners
• Improved opening of eBooks and ePeriodicals
• Improved response to Reading Now and Settings buttons
• Current reading page and bookmarks on all eBooks are properly saved when you power your Nook off
• Eligible LendMe eBooks in your library have LendMe flags
• Easier navigation of daily subscriptions with issues rolled into one folder
• Improved “back” button functionality for navigating eBooks and ePeriodicals
• Personal files downloaded and displayed in My Documents can be sorted by author and title
• Overall system improvements and battery optimization.

Personally, I have noticed that the battery seems to be keeping up a little better. I’ve also noticed that the “Formatting…” window that shows up when opening books is now labeled as “Opening Book…” The bookmarks have changed to show the page number they were saved on. I have also seen improved performance in connecting to my wireless network.

The biggest visual change is in the touchscreen icons. They now are “shiny” instead of flat colors like they were originally. It took me a day or so to really get to like them, but now I think they’re fine. Take a look:

Old

New

(Sorry, they don’t have many photos of the new menu yet, so it’s rather pixelated.)

So there you have it, really. I am really glad that B&N are taking to heart suggestions and needed changes and putting out updates for them. I can only see the device getting better as we go.

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.

I hope to have some more in depth thoughts about it soon, once I’ve had a chance to play with it more. Enjoy!

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.