eBook Reader Guide

The new ‘nook’ eBook Reader from Barnes & Noble, which is due to start shipping shortly, has generated a huge amount of interest in the USA, combining as it does a number of advanced features together with the ‘name recognition’ of one of America’s “Main Street, USA” book-sellers. These features include a second colour touch screen, the 3G and Wi-Fi wireless support and the close integration with the physical Barnes & Noble stores.

Features

Two displays

As far as the primary display goes, the nook is based around the same 6″ (diagonal) eInk display as used in the Amazon Kindle, Sony PRS-505 & Sony Touch, but it has an additional 3.5″ colour touch screen located below the primary display. This allows a colourful “Book Cover” library display/navigation feature in addition to it’s use as a touch control panel with virtual keyboard.

Wireless

The nook is intended to go head-to-head with the Amazon Kindle, and features both 3G and Wi-Fi access, with free Wi-Fi access in all Barnes & Noble stores. In addition, nook owners are promised exclusive content and discounts via their nooks when visiting such stores. As with the Kindle, samples of eBooks are available (although this is promised for any eBook they sell, which isn’t the case for the Kindle) for free download before purchase.

Capacity

The nook has 2GB on-board storage and supports microSD cards for additional storage. The battery life is quoted as 10 days with wireless disabled, or 2 days using the wireless – a big drop, but that’s an extreme example. As might be expected, the book supports annotations, allowing you to bookmark, highlight and make notes in addition to looking-up words via the built-in dictionary.

Lending

The other big ‘new’ feature (to eBooks, at least) that the nook brings with it is the ability to share eBooks by lending them to a friend for up to 14 days at a time. (However, what’s not yet clear is if a book can be ‘lent’ more than once in it’s life – there are suggestions that it’s a one-shot deal, so it remains to be seen just how useful this will actually be…)

Supported formats

As for file formats, the nook supports ePub, eReader and PDF formats, although there are suggestions that the DRMed format that the nook is using for ePub books may mean that DRMed ePub eBooks from Barnes & Noble stores may not work on the current version of other ePub reading Readers such as the Sony Touch or Sony Pocket. It also supports MP3 audio format, and JPEG pictures.

written by ebook_reader_guide