eReaders

Wednesday, 23 June 2010 by Marcus Aquinas.

I finally broke down and got an eReader (a Barnes & Noble Nook). I’ve been using various laptops and PDAs for the past 15 or 20 years, but they had problems of one sort or another. Laptops, for example were a bit too bulky for a relaxing read and with just a few hours’ worth of battery life were not exceptionally well suited to sustained reading. PDA screens are too small to read comfortably (I’m pretty much at the point where reading glasses are de rigueur) unless I zoomed the text to the point where I needed to turn the page every couple of seconds. So buying a dedicated device for reading eBooks seemed the logical way to go. Here are some of my impressions of the Barnes & Noble Nook. I don’t know that this qualifies as a full-blown review, but the Nook has its good points and its bad points.

Like most eReaders on the market today, the Nook uses Electronic Ink for its display. This type of display provides very good contrast, doesn’t use much battery power and is quite readable, even in bright sunlight.  The downside of this revolves around some limitations of the technology itself. Probably foremost among my complaints is that it precludes any type of backlighting, which makes reading in dim conditions almost impossible. If I read on the patio in the late evening, I have to increase the font size to compensate for the patio lighting, even though the lighting is sufficient (barely) for reading a normal book or magazine.

Another limitation of the Electronic Ink technology is that keyboard input is very slow. I’m a reasonably good typist, but typing on the Nook’s touchscreen is aggravatingly slow at perhaps one or two characters per second. Part of this is due to the touchscreen’s responsiveness (or lack thereof), but the remainder is due to the very slow refresh rate of the Electronic Ink display. This also means that while you can use the Nook as a basic web browser over Wi-Fi (more on that later), navigating web pages is tedious at best. My recommendation would be to use the Nook as a browser of last resort. If you’re in a position where you must have mobile web access, you’d be better off with a laptop or smart phone.

Moving on to power issues, B&N claims you can "Read for days. You can read for up to ten days without recharging with wireless off." My experience shows that to be an overstatement by a factor of about five. I can’t seem to go more than a couple of days without recharging and that is with the wireless turned off. If I were to leave my Nook in its screensaver mode, I could probably squeeze ten days out of it before needing to recharge. But two or three days of normal reading is about all I get. Someone else, who might read for no more than thirty minutes or an hour at a time, might be able to squeeze a few more days out of it. But for people who do extended reading sessions, ten days between charging is so far out that it is pure fluffery, bordering on false advertising (kind of like your cell phone will go for two or three days without charging if you don’t talk to anyone, which sort of defeats the purpose of having it in the first place).

The Nook supports a wide variety of file formats, specifically: EPUB, PDB and PDF. It does not support MOBI, TXT, or other file types. This makes Amazon’s Kindle a bit more flexible in some respects, except that Kindle does not support EPUB. It also means that you cannot read DRM protected eBooks purchased from anyone other than B&N. Non-DRM protected books can come from anywhere as long as the file format is supported. I found this a bit frustrating since one of my summer projects was to go back through L.E. Modesitt’s "Recluse" books, but I found that while they are almost all available in digital format from Amazon, only a couple are available from B&N. Advice to potential purchasers: check for availability of eBooks from your favorite author(s) BEFORE locking yourself into an eReader. Just like the Mac vs. PC vs. Linux conflicts, your hardware purchase is going to determine the books (software) available to you.

The Nook now comes in two flavors: Wi-Fi only and Wi-Fi+3G. The difference in cost for having 3G support is about $50 (~$200 for Wi-Fi+3G and ~$150 for Wi-Fi only). The data transfer speed for the 3G is nothing to write home about, but it’s more than adequate for downloading eBooks. In this, B&N’s claim of being able to read your book within a couple of minutes is pretty close to accurate. Considering that I am only using the 3G and finding it more than adequate for the demands that I place on it (checking daily updates and downloading the occasional purchase), I don’t have any major complaints on AT&T’s network support (OK, having only one bar of connectivity and then getting 4 bars by moving the Nook a couple of inches - "more bars in more places" should be taken literally, I guess). Since Kindle uses the same network, 3G support should not be a deciding factor in making your purchase decision.

I have not been thrilled with the inability of my Nook to connect to my home wireless network. Even though it’s 802.11b/g and my network is 802.11g, the Nook apparently does not support the encryption protocol that I am using. Leeching off of a neighbor’s unencrypted network was enough to show that yes, the Wi-Fi does work. It also demonstrated that the Nook is a browser of last-resort since some webpages will not even display in it. But for what it’s worth, the main display screen shows the webpage and the Nook’s touchscreen is used to move the cursor to the portion of the page you want, where you can then click on any links you might want to follow on the touchscreen. It works (sort of), but is kind of kludged.

The Reading controls are fairly simple: use the right arrow to move forward one page and use the left arrow to move backward one page. I was going to gripe about the inability to move to a particular page unless it had been previously bookmarked, but that capability was added with the v.1.4 software update (released this morning), as was "Extra Extra Large" font support for those of us who aren’t as eagle-eyed as we used to be. Which leads to the issue of software updates.

You are notified of software updates in "The Daily", which is B&N’s way of communicating with you. "The Daily" contains a couple of short blog columns (which are fairly well written) and the occasional notice about free eBooks (more on that later). It updates in the early morning hours during the week. I haven’t noticed any activity on the weekends, although I suppose such updates are possible. Once you have applied a software update, the notice goes away.

Software updates can be installed via two methods: either get it over the Wi-Fi connection or use a regular computer to download it and use the USB cable to move it to the Nook. Since I can’t get to my wireless network on the Nook, I had to use the latter method, which worked quite well. As soon as the file had been moved into the root directory of the Nook and I had ejected/disconnected the Nook, it immediately recognized that it had a software update to install and went right to it. A couple of minutes later, it was back up and running as it should.

EBook purchases are very quick and painless. Finding the book that you want is bit more complicated than simply browsing the aisles at a regular bookstore. But once located, purchasing and downloading an eBook are very simple, perhaps too simple. Like Amazon, B&N wants you to store a credit card or gift card with your account (you must have an account and register your Nook in order to read any DRM-protected eBooks). Assuming that you furnish such information to B&N, purchasing an eBook is as simple as selecting "buy it", confirming your purchase and waiting a couple of minutes for it to download.

One note of caution for those of you with B&N membership cards. All of your eBook purchases count as "online" purchases, so you will not receive your normal discount (and no discount on the Nook itself, either). In and of itself, this isn’t that big of a deal since the eBook is significantly cheaper than new hardbacks. But most other eBooks are priced comparably to paperbacks and you *DO* receive your discount on paperbacks, so the eBook actually ends up costing more than the paperback unless you factor in the the time and cost of driving to the closest B&N. An example should suffice to illustrate the point: "Haze" by L.E. Modesitt is $24.95 cover price in hardback and $7.99 for either the eBook or mass market paperback; you get your B&N discount on the hardback or paperback, but not on the eBook.

OK, now that I have the technical and financial gripes out of the way, let’s look at the Nook’s intended purpose: reading eBooks. On the whole, it very much lives up to expectations. Navigation is relatively easy, it feels good in the hand (it’s about the size of and perhaps a bit heavier than a small hardback) and the Electronic Ink display is crisp and very easy to read. About the only issues that I’ve encountered are its tendency to go to sleep unexpectedly and I keep forgetting that the controls were designed for either right- or left-handed readers. For some strange reason I keep thinking that the buttons on the left side are to go back a page. The touchscreen can be swiped (right-to-left to go forward or left-to-right to go backward, sort of like turning a regular page), but my results have been inconsistent. Perhaps it is a learned skill rather than a skill transferred from regular print reading.

Publications that were not formatted specifically for the Nook may not always display correctly. I transferred a couple of .pdf articles to check it out. The Nook did display them and they were quite readable, but sidebars and text highlight boxes seriously interfered with the flow of the text. It didn’t render them unreadable by any long stretch, but it did require giving much closer attention to breaks in the text in order to figure out where the text picked up again. EPUB books from B&N, Google Books and the Gutenberg Project all displayed nicely, although the text from Gutenberg was not quite as dark as the others. I’m not sure why that might be. Perhaps the book had been a conversion from Text to HTML to EPUB and something got lost in the process?

Electronic publishing does present one drawback that every reader needs to keep in mind. Because the barriers to publishing have been lowered somewhat (it doesn’t take much technical savvy to publish an eBook), you do not necessarily have agents and editors to help you separate the wheat from the chaff. I downloaded a few free eBooks from B&N and found that for about half of them, calling the writing "amateurish" would be a compliment. I won’t name titles and authors because I am not a professional book reviewer and my take is purely subjective. But take advantage of sample chapters when they are offered. The Nook allows you to read any B&N eBook for an hour per day as long as you are in a B&N hotspot. If time permits, use that capability to avoid the chaff.

On the whole, I’m not terribly dissatisfied with my Nook. Its technical specs don’t quite match up to real-world usage, but that’s generally to be expected with any piece of technology. Reading is different enough from regular print publications that it will take a little time to get used to it, but it’s pleasant enough that it won’t interfere with the enjoyment of a good book. Go forth and read.

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