The Nook by Barnes & Noble

So, after much debate, I decided to finally make the transition from strictly paper books to the e-world. A good friend of mine had done a bit of research and settled on the Nook, so I decided to trust her instincts and go that direction, as well.

One reason I decided to go electronic was that I found it cumbersome to carry sufficient paper books with me while I was traveling abroad last fall. I took four novels and a couple of guidebooks with me, and it took up quite a bit of room in my suitcase. I'd rather travel light. The Nook, unaugmented with additional memory, is capable of carrrying 1500 books at once, so that should appease my travel needs quite well.

The second reason I decided to do it was economic. When new novels come out in series that I am following, the hardbacks are usually around $25. I can either wait for my library to get the book in and put myself on the waiting list, or wait for the paperback, if I don't want to spend that much money. Ebooks are quite a bit cheaper than hard copies, and I can get them immediately on the day they're released. In theory, anyway. I haven't yet bought an ebook for my reader, but I think I'm all set up to do it.

I got my Nook as a Christmas present, technically, but since I had to go with my wife to show her what to buy, exactly, I had access a little before then. So, I charged up the battery and loaded up a bunch of books from my Baen Free Library CDs, so the reader wouldn't be useless on Christmas morning, then gave it back to her to wrap and place under the tree.

The Nook takes a bit of getting used to, but I think I'm adjusting well. It's about the right size to hold in one hand for simple reading, and if you hold it just right, your thumb can read the page turning button, leaving your other hand free for food and beverages, if you're a mealtime reader. The page transitions are pretty quick, certainly comparable with my usual one-handed page turns with paper books. The font size is easily adjustable, but only the smallest size available actually fits an entire page on the screen at once, and that's just a bit of a strain for my old eyes, so one ends up hitting the page button twice as many times as for a regular book. Once you get the timing down, you can be reading the last sentence and hit the button, and move seamlessly to the next screen.

One downside to the Nook is that it isn't backlit. So, for low light conditions, or reading in the dark, you have to have a little clip-on booklight. Fortuitously, my son bought me one made especially for the Nook as a Christmas present. There's also a balance to be achieved between battery life and convenience. The Nook has a screen saver, "sleep" mode that turns on after a specified amount of time without any activity. If you tend to put a book down, wander off to brew a pot of coffee or let the cat in, the lower wait time settings will be annoying, as you'll have to "wake" your Nook every time you return. I think I finally settled on a 10 minute sleep mode wait time as optimal.

Battery life might turn out to be an issue. So far, after several hours of reading, the lowest I've gotten the batter level is 67%, so that's not too bad, but it might be a problem if I'm traveling for extended periods without access to an outlet or a USB port to charge it up with. The jury is still out on this one.
It's quite easy to "sideload" ebooks from your computer to your Nook. When plugged into the USB port, it behaves much like a thumb drive, and you simply drag and drop or copy and paste the files into the proper directory on the Nook drive, then "eject" the drive and you're up and running with all your new books. Occasioally, if I haven't immediately disconnected the drive from the computer, it's gotten a bit confused, and I had to re-plug and re-eject to get it to see the new acquisitions, but so far it hasn't really "lost" anything.
So far, I've loaded up about 400 books or stories on it, and haven't really impacted its total capacity. It's also possible to add a microSD card of up to 16 Gb, which takes the total to around 15,000 books possible. It could be a while before I need to expand.

One other issue, which I understand there are some hacks out there to solve, is that the Nook displays your entire library as a "flat" database. You get a long long list of book titles to scroll through to find your book, if you're just browsing to figure out what you want to read next. There is, however, a search feature that will find a particular title for you, and B&N just came out with the version 1.5 code for the Nook, which introduces the Shelves functionality, so you can put groups of books together on shelves, perhaps by category (I made mine Authors), so as to simplify the process of finding what you want. I'm not sure what the maximum number of shelves allowed is yet, but I'm sure I'll find out at some point.

I'll probably never get away from paper copies entirely, but I'm enjoying playing with my new toy, and hoping it does what I'd expected it would do for me.