As you know, I’m a big fan of the Kindle, despite being frequently disappointed by Amazon’s Orwellian practices. But it’s probably more accurate to say I’ve become a big fan of the e-book, something I never would have thought I’d say. And it just happens that the Kindle is the one I got.
Like me, you may have heard over the last few days that Barnes & Noble is introducing their own Gizmo called Nook. And taking my first look at the tech specs and comparison with Kindle, it looks pretty cool.
Frankly, when I first heard about this, it didn’t make much sense to me. I just didn’t think B&N still had the heft as a company to really make a serious play in this space, especially with Apple and Microsoft rumored to be coming in soon and Sony already there. I think of their stores closing these days (or local one closed about a year ago, leaving a massive lot of empty retail space where there used to be a great bookstore). But at least on execution, it looks pretty nice. And B&N does have the relationship with the sellers.
Just on a very casual glance some features that make Nook sound much better than Kindle are 1) color, speaks for itself, 2) touch screen, curious to see how it’s executed but that could make it a million times nicer than Kindle, 3) the ability to share or lend books to other people with a Nook or other mobile device. Lots of other stuff. But those jumped out at me. And B&N claims to be entering the market with more titles available than Kindle, as well as a lot more free titles. For you tech nerds out there, Nook is Android-based.
Presumably where we’re going, eventually, is that you’ll have a handful of different readers — competing on ranges of cost and feature sets — and at least relatively open standards in terms of book format. So you don’t have your whole digital book collection hostage to one company — as some of us now do, very unhappily, with Amazon.
Very eager to get a look at this thing.
(ed.note: In case you’re wondering whether this post is part of our weekend discussion about TPM on different mobile devices … no, totally unrelated. Just happened to notice this and wrote it up as part of my Kindle obsession.)
Late Update: It seems I was at least partly bamboozled by Nook’s spec sheet. The color, as far as I can tell, is only the book cover section down at the bottom. Basically where you thumb through your library. The reading section seems to be pure grayscale, just like the Kindle. For reading that’s fine, probably preferable. Where it’s fallen short for me on the Kindle is that even black and white photos or illustrations are essential unviewable.
