It's too early to endorse boasts by Barnes & Noble that its new Nook is "the world's most advanced e-book reader" and will be "the must-have gift of this holiday season." But the $259 Nook does look very promising, based on seeing it up close in a demo by a B&N executive at yesterday’s launch for the device.
In many respects, the Nook, which ships from online orders (and goes on sale at B&N stores) in late November, resembles many existing or upcoming e-readers. It uses e-ink display technology, downloads content wirelessly at no extra cost (in its case, using the AT&T network), and has a 6-inch screen (the same size as Amazon’s Amazon's Kindle 2, also $259, and Sony’s Touch, $299).
Yet the Nook also offers some true distinctions. Three notable ones:
• A second, color screen. Adding either color or touch capability to an e-ink screen can compromise the crispness of black and white text, according to manufacturers I've talked with.The Nook offers an ingenious workaround: An additional color touchscreen for navigation, located beneath the main, reading screen.
You can select a book by swiping through color thumbnails of the covers of your e-books, much as iTunes allows with album covers. There's also a page-turn option on the bottom screen, though the exec demonstrating the device didn't show that feature to me. He did reveal some other navigation screens on the touchscreen, and demonstrated the page-turn buttons/strips on each side of the six- inch screen, which resembled those on Sony Readers.
• You can lend a book from your Nook. Friends who also own a Nook—or who simply download the free Barnes and Noble eReader software to their smart phone—can borrow books from your Nook library for up to two weeks. As with loans of actual books, you can't read the book while it's on loan, and not every title in the B&N catalog is loanable (publishers and authors can veto the feature).
A similar sharing feature for music between Microsoft Zunes was derided and then dropped from the latest version of the music player, but the Nook loans appear to have fewer limitations than did zipping tunes between Zunes.
• It has an Android operating system. None of the apps for Android, the Google mobile OS that powers many if the season’s hot new smart phones, will be available for the Nook at its launch. But, as BN.com president William Lynch pointed out, the OS's open architecture is expected to draw a growing number of phone apps that could fairly easily be adapted for the Nook.
The Nook is available now for pre-order, with the first 10,000 people who do so receiving a free download of best-seller "The Tipping Point" by Malcolm Gladwell. (Gladwell made a humorous appearance at yesterday’s event, prowling the room reading from his work. On a Nook, naturally.)
We expect to receive and review the Nook on or before its launch date, which remains inexact—but presumably will be before November 27, aka Black Friday. —Paul Reynolds.
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