The Nook Ebook reader Challenges The Kindle and The iPadAmazon's Kindle ebook reader has produced a great deal of fuss. Yet it is not really a noisy, top-shelf fuss - the fuss has a a bit tinny, artificial quality to it. For instance, Amazon said that on Christmas Day, for the first time ever, it sold a lot more ebooks than regular paper books. Which is remarkable. Except Amazon will not point out what number of e-books that's. Or even what number of Kindles are have been sold.
Yes, Kindle has been getting the most interest among e-readers, but that is partly because it has not had a lot legitimate competitors past the Sony Reader. Till today, that is: enter the Nook, from Barnes & Noble. As opposed to the Sony Reader, the Nook gets there with a large bookselling infrastructure currently in place around it. Just like the Kindle, it costs $259.
The very first thing you notice regarding the Nook is that it looks a whole lot like the Kindle. That is because its key component - that unusual black-on-gray, matte screen - is precisely the same as the one in the Kindle. Amazon and Barnes & Noble obtain them from the same supplier, E Ink.
Yet there are variations. The Nook's layout is better than the Kindle's. The casing around the edge, which doubles as the page-turn button, offers a nicer feel to it, and its clickability is exactly right: tough enough to lessen unintended clicks - a key hazard with the Kindle - but sensitive enough that it isn't hard work.
The Nook also has a small color touch screen for navigation, that brightens up the experience, and it's more responsive than the poky main screen. However it's a mixed blessing. The iPhone has trained us to expect higher efficiency from touchscreens, and this is a decidedly pre-iPhone touchscreen. The interface has not been completely play-tested either; there are a couple of rough edges and dead ends.
The Bottom line: the Nook is a better package than the Kindle. But the real question is, Will either of them endure the arrival of Apple's tablet computer, which was launched in late January? We at one time thought the only way to read e-books was on boring E Ink displays, but Apple's ultra-sharp iPhone displays have turned out to be otherwise. As nice as the < href="">Nook is, like the Kindle, it will more than likely be obsolete way before paper publications are.
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