FO: NOOK nifty features

[ArtLady1981]

Husband and I were at the Barnes and Noble this evening after dinner at Appleby's with my brother and his wife!

B&N had a table filled with Nook readers, ready to go. It was fun to turn them on and play with them. A B&N rep came by and shared a couple of 'nifty' features:

1) if you purchase an e-book from B&N for your Nook...you can "loan" the book to a Nook enabled friend for up to 2 weeks, no cost! During the 2 weeks, you will not have access to the book. It is just as if you loaned a literal book to them. But after 2 weeks, the Nook software whisks the book out of their Nook and sends it back to your Nook!
2) You have a free 3G wi-fi network with which to add e-books to your Nook.
3) You can "send" your Nook books to your computer and to your cellphone, thereby enabling you to read your book(s) on either of the 3 pieces of equipment: computer, cell phone, or Nook
4) You do not have to sign up for a cell phone service to use your Nook downloadable features.
5) You can upgrade your internal SD memory card to add more books, however, it hold 1500 books.
6) There is a full color homepage strip under the reading part of the Nook. Your features, etc are in full color.

[Jannette]

Sounds cool! I love my Kindle and wouldn't part with it for the world.

[AngelaR]

I have heard that Kindle will soon allow you to "loan" books to friends with Kindles. That is the only feature the Nook has that the Kindle doesn't.

My hubby has the Sony E-Reader... the major drawback is that he cannot read Nook or Kindle formats. However, it can read PDFs, .doc, and .lit quite easily. Which is good because I have over 10K books in .lit form that I have to reformat to .mobi to read on my Kindle and sometimes that conversion does not make it easy to read.

[Jan in CA]

I thought Nook was the way to go till I saw this posted in the other thread.
http://video.nytimes.com/video/2009/...nook&st=Search

They all sound awesome when you read about them, but I think what it comes down to is there isn't one perfect reader yet. They all have something lacking so it's like buying a house.. figure out what flaws you can live with and what you can't.

[ElraTyln]

I too LOVE my Kindle!! It's the best gift I've gotten in a long time! I read at least an hour every day, so it's gotten a good bit of use since Christmas! I Love it dearly!

[ArtLady1981]

...but I think what it comes down to is there isn't one perfect reader yet. They all have something lacking so it's like buying a house.. figure out what flaws you can live with and what you can't.

So true, Jan!

I'm holding off for a year or two. Gonna wait and see how the e-readers evolve.

I'm especially turned off by the incompatibility issues. Can't read Amazon e-books with Nook, can't read Nook books with Sony e-Reader...etc. etc. If I own a darn e-book...I should be able to use any e-reader to read it. Until that happens, I feel e-books are very limiting. I don't like it.

Well, at least MY EYES can read any ole darn book!
I don't think bookstores will be going out of business any time soon!

[Jan in CA]

Well, at least MY EYES can read any ole darn book!
I don't think bookstores will be going out of business any time soon!

Exactly! We go to the used book stores a lot and use the library, too. I have 3 book readers on my iPod Touch and I use them when I'm at a doctor/hairdresser etc when I don't want to bring a book. Unless I bring knitting which happens on occasion.

[jess_hawk]

I have heard that Kindle will soon allow you to "loan" books to friends with Kindles. That is the only feature the Nook has that the Kindle doesn't.

My hubby has the Sony E-Reader... the major drawback is that he cannot read Nook or Kindle formats. However, it can read PDFs, .doc, and .lit quite easily. Which is good because I have over 10K books in .lit form that I have to reformat to .mobi to read on my Kindle and sometimes that conversion does not make it easy to read.

How do you reformat to something so it can be read on a Kindle or nook? I don't have a big eBook library at the moment (thankfully) but they're on Adobe Digital Editions. I'm thinking about asking for either a nook or a kindle (I read too fast to reasonably carry the number of books that I can read on the average long-distance trip... so while I like my books in hard copy, I'm being sucked towards eBook readers...), but I wish I could put my current eBooks on whichever I get.

Or, I could go with a Sony reader, and then I can't buy ebooks from Amazon or B&N, which is 90% of my book purchases.

[ArtLady1981]

I'm also waiting on the i-Pad to evolve. Waiting to see if it, or another similar, will be more of a universally useful device.

I read an article in the Sunday paper, about e-readers. The main point that stood out was the growing pains of this new device.

The article said that the market will never be able to sustain so many versions. So, after all the cards are on the table, there will be a "last man standing". One that has weathered the fire storm of innovation, and remains as the best, the baddest, and hopefully, the most affordable.

The article said that e-readers will never become mainstream until they lower to $99 for a decent reader.

Few analysts believe the current number of e-reader devices on the market is sustainable, especially with more tablet devices on the way. Hewlett-Packard, Dell and Google all have them in development.

Amazon will benefit from having its Kindle app available on the iPad, especially because its own e-reader doesn't have a color display. A IDG analyst said that 'we don't think it's sufficient for Amazon to go with only a bl/wh display Kindle.

[Jan in CA]

I love my iPod Touch so the large iPad is a natural progression/interest for me, too. We'll have to see how it all pans out in a few years.