Lots of hoopla over the new Barnes & Noble devise the nook. I admit – it looks cool! I am not about to drop my kindle for it, but I am interested in how things will develop now that Amazon.com has some real ereader competition.

Features that I like:

• Expandable memory – my Kindle 1 has this, but they did away with it on the Kindle 2. B&N has obviously realized that was a mistake by amazon.
• Lend a book to a friend…. I love this in theory, but am curious as to how this works out. I wonder if it will go the way of the Text to Speech function of the kindle and publishers will be able to ask that it is not available on their ebooks.
• PDF Support – I read a lot of pdfs on my kindle now, but always have to convert them first. It would be handy to skip that step.

Dislikes:

• B&N claims about ebook availability – they are just tweaking the statistics. They are including free public domains in their numbers to make it look like they have more books than amazon.com. Sneaky sneaky!
• touch screen – just not a fan. fingerprints everywhere… I feel like I am constantly cleaning my ipod touch and I would be really annoyed to have that problem with an e-reader.
• No Word documentation support. very odd to have pdf support but leave off something as easy as word documents.
• Battery drain – The LCD screen is going suck power from the battery like a dyson vacuum. I wonder if you can turn it off? My kindle battery takes FOREVER to die and I take advantage of it.
• Sales Tax. Amazon doesn’t charge sales tax on ebooks in most states because it isn’t required to. Barnes and Nobles have brick and mortar stores in most states and I assume they would have to add sales tax onto ebook purcahses – 5-8% added cost to each book. ouch!
• The wireless network feature on the nook only works while you are in a Barnes and Nobles store. Outside of the stores you use the AT&T network to access only BN.com – My kindle wireless(through sprint) works everywhere and comes with a web-browser so I can access more than just the amazon store.

A closer look at the nook features by zdnet.com can be found here

On a related note, Today I found an interesting blog post on book pricing and availability…It is certainly not scientific, but by comparison Amazon is way ahead in pricing and availability.
http://blog.gideonaddington.com/2009/07/the-land-of-ebooks/

Other posts you may like:

• The Nook and Book Lending
• Odds, Ends, and meet my Kindle.
• Kindle vs Nook – IReader Review’s take