Posts Tagged ‘nook’
Saturday Sound Off – January 15, 2011
Hello my dear blogger buddies!
Long time no talk. How are you? What’s new with you? Me? I’m fine… enjoying the last week of my winter break before school starts up again. Hopefully this semester is a little bit easier. I’m taking a light load of 3 math classes and a graphics design class. I’m going into it with a 4.0 GPA and hoping to keep it that way.
All things Kindlicious
The “big” news of late? Kindle now has a lending feature. Big news is a relative term as it pretty limited, just like the nook lending feature. Both devices now allow book lending between devices and apps following these restrictions:
- A book may be lent once, and only once.
- A book is lent out for 14 days only and during that time is inaccessible on the owner’s device
- Not all books are available for lending and which books are available depend upon publisher restrictions. Currently Barnes & Nobles has about 30% of its ebook stock, which includes public domain free books, as lendable. I have yet to see a number for Amazon.
I was hoping that Amazon would be a little more lenient and allow it to be lent more than once, it would have been a great selling point for those who are in book clubs, but I didn’t expect it.
IReaderReview.com had a slew of really good posts over the last month. A few of my favorites:
- The Race to Zero – a good look at ebook pricing after the installment of agency pricing.
- $55,500 for Indie Author in 31 Days – 5 Independent authors earned over $15,000 and 25 independent authors sold more than 2,500 ebooks in December.
- What else can you do with the kindle besides read? – a great list!
Something that seems to have gone almost unnoticed but I think is far cooler than the lending feature is the ability to side-load your kindle formatted books onto your iphone/ipad/itouch devices. You are no longer restricted to only books in your amazon account while using the Kindle app on your iDevice. Through iTunes you can add mobipocket/prc/azw books onto your device and read them in the Kindle app. This is especially useful for book reviews who don’t have a kindle but like ebooks.
Entirely random but I ran across this graphic from Newsweek and thought it was an interesting comparison. I’d love to see the sourcing but can’t seem to locate it.
Author News
Rachel Vincent announced the details her new adult series. The first book in the Unbound series will be Blood Bound and have a stronger romance theme than the early shifter books. It sounds like a unique world and I am definitely looking forward to it!
The first book in Keri Arthur’s new Dark Angel series, Darkness Unbound is now up for preorder on Amazon.com.
Richelle Mead posted an excerpt from Iron Crowned, the third book in the Dark Swan series, here. I miss Eugenie, can’t wait for this release.
Moira Rogers has the coolest post ever here. I’ve been trying to be better about taking notes and keeping a notebook of series I love and their characters. I appreciate this post so much. Also. Andrew is still mine.
Books Read in December & January so far
- Bayou Moon by Ilona Andrews – 5 stars
- Alpha by Rachel Vincent – review coming
- Total Eclipse by Rachel Caine – review coming
- The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson
- The Girl who Played with Fire by Stieg Larsson
- The Girl who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest by Stieg Larsson
Books Added to Kindle This Week…
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Music listening to while writing this blog entry…Back in Your Head by Tegan and Sara
Contests: E-Readers Everywhere!
In the interest of helping to spread the e-reader love, even if it isn’t a Kindle(!), I wanted to share a few contests I have found for e-readers. First, an awesome contest Anya Bast and Lauren Dane are hosting.
If you want a chance to win your own e-reader then click here to enter the “Curl up with a book… and a Nook Contest”. You have until January 5th to enter!
Next, The Bibliophilic Blog is giving away an e-reader of your choice!
You have until March 1st to enter, click here!
Don’t forget to enter my own contest to win a copy of Rachel Caine’s Ill Wind here.
Reviews of the Barnes & Noble Nook start to surface.
The official review from Engadget has made its way to the surface. Some quick quotes:
In our tests — and this may just be due to the Kindle we were using — we felt it very slightly outperformed Amazon’s option in contrast, though the Kindle has a considerably faster refresh rate when turning pages. In fact, the Nook’s refresh speed was sometimes a little annoying, with us actually having moments in between page turns of waiting for more content — not a feeling you want to encounter if you’re trying to mimic the book-reading experience.
In regards to navigation:
once you get the hang of the system it starts to make some sense, but it’s nothing we’d describe as intuitive, and your rhythm is thrown off by one major factor: the extremely sluggish response of the device. That’s right, you’re not zipping and zooming through any of these menus, you’re patiently waiting for the device to do its thing. That laggy scrolling we saw in the demo the day this was launched? Not really much better in the release version.
User Interface:
While the UI is different (not necessarily a bad thing in our eyes), there are also places where it is plain bad (necessarily a bad thing in our eyes). There’s instability to spare in the review unit we used. More than once we saw the familiar Android force close / wait message when trying to load a piece of the software up, and we encountered a lot of unexpected pauses and lag when trying to get through menus, causing a number of incorrect selections and general annoyance.
Conclusion:
when it came to day to day use, we felt let down in a big way, and can only imagine how magnified that feeling would be if we’d gone and shelled out nearly $300 for the device.
In the end, the Nook is an intriguing product launched by a powerful force in the world of booksellers, but the initial offering feels long on promises and short on delivery.
I can’t imagine that Barnes & Noble is having a very good day today. Additionally, it seems that Nooks are now not shipping until January, completely missing the holiday season – that can’t be good for them. They haven’t handled this release well, hopefully they can get it to together and give Amazon a run for their money…. then we all win 
After this posted, I stumbed upon more reviews:
CNET
Gizmodo
NY Times
All Things Digital
Consumer Reports
Business Week
Kindle vs Nook – IReader Review’s take
I stumbled upon this review on twitter and thought it made a pretty good list of pros and cons. The only thing it missed is the B&N claim of 1million books includes the stuff that is public domain, you can get those books on a multitude of sites on the internet for your kindle as well.
Conclusion – Kindle Vs Nook is exceedingly close, with Kindle a bit ahead.
If you need an eReader for Christmas the Kindle wins – Kindle at $259 with Free Internet is an incredible value proposition. Nook is sold out till Jan 4th and if you can wait till January – consider which device suits your needs better and pick one.If Free Internet or the Read To Me feature or International WhisperNet and Wikipedia is important to you, then the Kindle is a clear winner. The Kindle is also better for families as 6 devices can share a book (at the smae time). The Nook has memory extensibility, ePub support, WiFi, a replaceable battery, and Mac and Blackberry support – making it better for some people.
So if you are considering a kindle or a nook, may want to take a look at the comparison at IReader Review. You can find an even more indepth review here.
A Game of Thrones (A Song of Ice and Fire, #1) by George R.R. Martin
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