E-Readers: Nook, Kindle, or Other?

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Den-in-NH

Den-in-NH

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So my wife has been wanting an e-reader for awhile (personally, I'd much rather hold an actual book, but whatever) and her birthday is coming up and I thought I'd pick one up.

So, techno-geeks: who makes the best e-reader? Seems to me the Nook is the one to go for, but I really am not that familiar with any of them, so I'm seeking input.

Major considerations - overall ease of use, ease of purchasing/downloading reading materials, readabilty of the screen/text and durability.

Your thoughts?
 
The kids got my wife a Nook. They did some research and concluded that was the best option. The big advantage is that you can buy books from any site, but the Kindle restricts you to Amazon.

She loves it.
 
Overall, they're about the same. I've got a Nook (just liked some of the extra flexibility it had) and have been very happy with it. That said, I got my Dad a Kindle for Christmas as I felt he'd probably have an easier time with the keyboard.

I'll admit I think the Kindle's screen has a little better contrast, so if it's someone with weaker eyes, that's a plus. As of the last firmware update, they're about the same performance wise (Nook was lagging a bit). The Nook also has the advantage of in-store use where you can read anything in store on it while there, plus little in-store coupons that will pop up (free drink or cheesecake at the cafe, stuff like that).

Final thing. If you're wife is at all a geek type, consider a Nook Color. Obviously much lower battery life (needs to be charged daily), but you do get quite a few little bonuses for the money. Plus, they can be rooted now and turned into a low priced android tablet.
 
We exchanged the new Nook Colors for Xmas. Love them. Love the magazines in full color. Love the access to social networking sites. Love everything about it. More money than the B&W but more features.
 
I bought a Nook last year and ended up getting rid of it. The PDF rendering sucked, and their customer service is worse.

You may not care about rendering Mathematical Symbols (see below), but if you read on, you will realize that B&N's so-called 'tech support' sucks pumice.

They claimed that the Nook supports the ePub standard, but it really doesn't do so fully. I put a couple of freely downloadable mathematical ePubs on it that had mathematical symbols like script R (used to denote the set of real numbers), and those symbols rendered as question marks. By contrast, open source e-Readers (like fbReader for Linux) rendered those symbols just fine.

Since the ePubs in question were freely downloadable, I emailed one to the Nook technical support address saying 'here is an example of something that doesn't render correctly. Please forward to your technical people and ask them to fix this in a future firmware release.' The first few tiers of 'script monkeys' who replied were obviously looking for a pre-canned response in their script monkey database that might make me shut up and go away. After about two weeks of email back-and-forth I finally got a reply from someone who seemed to understand my question.

His reply?

"We didn't sell you the epub with mathematical symbols in it, so it's not our problem."

I'm sorry, but if the set of grad students who wrote fbReader can figure out how to render mathematical symbols, and give their software away, your so-called 'professional programmers' ought to at least match their performance if they are going to charge me for their work.

You might consider the Ectaco JetBook. I've heard good things about it, and when I sent them the same epub, the first guy that replied said 'yeah, I loaded it onto my own JetBook, and I can see the script R.'

Again, you may not care about mathematical symbols, but you might care about tech support and customer service.
 
sprocketboy said:
I bought a Nook last year and ended up getting rid of it. The PDF rendering sucked, and their customer service is worse.

You may not care about rendering Mathematical Symbols (see below), but if you read on, you will realize that B&N's so-called 'tech support' sucks pumice.

They claimed that the Nook supports the ePub standard, but it really doesn't do so fully. I put a couple of freely downloadable mathematical ePubs on it that had mathematical symbols like script R (used to denote the set of real numbers), and those symbols rendered as question marks. By contrast, open source e-Readers (like fbReader for Linux) rendered those symbols just fine.

Since the ePubs in question were freely downloadable, I emailed one to the Nook technical support address saying 'here is an example of something that doesn't render correctly. Please forward to your technical people and ask them to fix this in a future firmware release.' The first few tiers of 'script monkeys' who replied were obviously looking for a pre-canned response in their script monkey database that might make me shut up and go away. After about two weeks of email back-and-forth I finally got a reply from someone who seemed to understand my question.

His reply?

"We didn't sell you the epub with mathematical symbols in it, so it's not our problem."

I'm sorry, but if the set of grad students who wrote fbReader can figure out how to render mathematical symbols, and give their software away, your so-called 'professional programmers' ought to at least match their performance if they are going to charge me for their work.

You might consider the Ectaco JetBook. I've heard good things about it, and when I sent them the same epub, the first guy that replied said 'yeah, I loaded it onto my own JetBook, and I can see the script R.'

Again, you may not care about mathematical symbols, but you might care about tech support and customer service.
Click to expand...

Wait. What?












;)
 
bideau said:
The kids got my wife a Nook. They did some research and concluded that was the best option. The big advantage is that you can buy books from any site, but the Kindle restricts you to Amazon.

She loves it.
Click to expand...

Amazon is partnering with Target regarding the Kindle. Accessories now, books later. Going to open up accessibility options.
 
I bought the Kindle.

I looked into user reviews before I bought...and Kindle seemed to ahve the most satisfaction.

I also had more faith in Amazon supporting their product long term....but that's basically just my gut feeling.

Screen is real easy to read.

Mine was $130 around December. I have wireless at home so I only needed the "3G" I think they call it.

I am very happy with it.
 
Bought my wife the Kindle over the Nook as the color option, while pretty just eats up battery faster and well, unless you are reading magazines on it, books still only print in black and white, so all you get for color is the cover. Amazon is MUCH better in support of it as well. My wife has had it almost a year now and the book selections are the same, but are so much quicker than the nook. We compared it to her best friends and the same book too a few minutes longer to download. So.. go with Kindle.
 
I just got an iPad, and I am loving it. iBooks is very good, and there is a kindle app if you want to go that way.
 
patswin said:
I just got an iPad, and I am loving it. iBooks is very good, and there is a kindle app if you want to go that way.
Click to expand...

May not be for long if Apple doesn't back off this we want 30% of everything bs...
 
Roydog16 said:
Bought my wife the Kindle over the Nook as the color option, while pretty just eats up battery faster and well, unless you are reading magazines on it, books still only print in black and white, so all you get for color is the cover. Amazon is MUCH better in support of it as well. My wife has had it almost a year now and the book selections are the same, but are so much quicker than the nook. We compared it to her best friends and the same book too a few minutes longer to download. So.. go with Kindle.
Click to expand...

The recent firmware updates for the Nook leveled the playing field. I put mine next to my dad's Kindle and they run pretty much neck and neck. Kindle still opens the book about a second faster, but downloads and page turns are pretty much identical now.

I have noticed the Nook's trouble with some symbols and special characters, so as Sprocketboy said, math people be warned.

I'm really hoping to get a decent tablet pretty soon so I don't have to haul my personal laptop back and forth to DC (for web and pron surfing at night ya know), but even then I'll probably keep the Nook as the main reader for the ease of battery life. The tablet (be it Nook Color, Galaxy Tab, Xoom, or whatever) would be for the other fun.
 
My wife bought me the Nook Color as an early Christmas gift on the day it was released at my local B&N (12/02/10). At first I hated any applications but the reader on it. Now with the 1.1 operating system revision, I love what it does. I subscribe to Pandora anyways but it is nice to read a book and listen to my choice of music while doing so. I can also keep an eye on this group and a couple of others that get much of my time and attention. If there is anything major going on, I can always go to my laptop for easier participation in the group. To be fair, I have seen but not used a Kindle and by the way, B&N Customer Service has been great when I have needed them. The Nook along with you folks has really helped me keep whatever sanity that I still have during my recovery and that is greatly appreciated.
 
IPad, Nook color, android, etc are much more versatile devices.

But personally, I get eyestrain if I look at a backlit lcd screen for a long time.

For reading books, I really prefer the e-ink displays such as the Kindle and the non color Nook. They're not good at graphics, multimedia, etc. But the e-ink devices do a great job of rendering the clearest, easiest on the eye text. Plus they are a lot cheaper and have a much longer battery life than the color lcd screen tablets.
 
dropKickMurphy said:
IPad, Nook color, android, etc are much more versatile devices.

But personally, I get eyestrain if I look at a backlit lcd screen for a long time.

For reading books, I really prefer the e-ink displays such as the Kindle and the non color Nook. They're not good at graphics, multimedia, etc. But the e-ink devices do a great job of rendering the clearest, easiest on the eye text. Plus they are a lot cheaper and have a much longer battery life than the color lcd screen tablets.
Click to expand...

Yup, pretty much exactly why I'll keep my Nook even when I get a tablet.
 
I didn't want a Nook, because I like regular books, but it seemed to be popular with a lot of my friends and I was finally given one (B&W Nook) as a gift and have finally begun to appreciate the pros along with the cons.

Pros-- it's great to be able to resize and change the font style, because you can read it effectively while on a treadmill or other exercise machine, which is much harder with a regular book and almost impossible for me with a paperback. Being able to quickly locate and download a new book for around 10 bucks definitely has it's advantages and if you are, say, going on vacation, you can take a shitload of books with you in a pretty compact device.

Overall, not bad. I won't stop reading regular books, but the Nook is a good tool for a book lover and has it's place. I don't notice it that much any more and disappear into a good story the same way as I used to. It gets you where you need to go.

Cons-- it absolutely sucks to try to refer to something you read 50 pages ago, for instance a map or a picture that you want to review. Those maps and pictures are also of much poorer quality than a real book and non-zoomable as far as I know.

The bit about being able to "share" purchased books is total BS. I have yet to see a single newer/desirable title that you can do that with. A real book you can hand to somebody when you are done with it, so that sucks, because I'm into one now 3 people I know would love to read and I can't give it to them without handing them the damn nook for a week.

TIP-- I was being driven crazy by the battery draining way too quickly and discovered that if I turn on the "airplane mode" it stops hunting for a wi-fi signal and the battery lasts about 10 times longer. I only turn it on to download something and that way Skynet has a harder time locating me.
 
Hawg73 said:
TIP-- I was being driven crazy by the battery draining way too quickly and discovered that if I turn on the "airplane mode" it stops hunting for a wi-fi signal and the battery lasts about 10 times longer. I only turn it on to download something and that way Skynet has a harder time locating me.
Click to expand...

Same here, mine stays in Airplane mode unless I need to download or go to a store.

Another tip for you. Don't use the power button to put it back to sleep, just let it time out. For some reason that causes a drain too. It's also nice that they added a function in the latest firmware to completely power down if idle for a couple days.
 
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