Another Decade Nearly Gone ... Whatever the Hell Its Name Is.

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, animals both domesticated and wild, the decade is coming to a close, and I still have no idea what to call it. I will miss the 80's, 90's and the ... Ones and Zeroes? The 0's? And while I'm brooding over this decade, what about the next decade? Is it the Mostly Teens? The 11's? It's like the whole he and she business; a very confusing mess that will never have a solid support system.




I demoed the nook over at my local Barnes & Nobles today and was fairly pleased with it. There was no, Oh my God! I need to pre-order one now, and then complain endlessly when it doesn't arrive on the promised date ... more like a, that's cool, can't wait for the next version.

Most of the issues I had with the device could be fixed with some minor firmware updates. Coming from an iPod Touch world, which has a really intuitive touchscreen, I was less than impressed with the nook's touchscreen, or what I like to call in more technical terms: the touch-flick thingy. The nook's touch-flick thingy reminded me of browsing the apps store on an iPod Touch with a bad Wi-Fi connection ... you know, that bit of lag you get while the images are waiting to load? Well, that's the nook's whole browsing interface in a nutshell.

I also found features like search, dictionary and highlight a bit awkward and jerky. The main problem with all of them is that they were slow and cumbersome. For example, I could easily pick up a dictionary and find a word faster than it took me to look up a word in nook.

But overall it's about the reading experience right? And in that area I was mostly impressed. The screen is pleasing to the eyes. After a few pages I could see myself even forgetting I'm reading on an electric device. Unfortunately, some of the books I previewed were formatted poorly, the spacing and paragraphs looked choppy, and some of the letters were hacked off at the corners. This, I was told, was a problem with the publisher not properly converting the book for an e-reader, but it was annoying. It would be like buying a movie and seeing green screen instead of the intended special effect, and the sales guy saying, well, you know, not all movies are formatted properly for your television, but whatever.

So my verdict is I'll wait until they make a few more firmware updates before considering a nook. It also gives me some time to see how Amazon and Sony respond.


Later Fiends,

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A Nook, a Kindle and a Tablet Walk into a Bar ...

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, animals both domesticated and wild, pokol; vurderlak; eyalik.



Image courtesy of wired.com


Some interesting debates over e-books since the news broke of Barnes & Noble's new nook e-reader. I think the pros and cons between the Kindle and nook have been exhausted, so I'll try to avoid who has the bigger--um--set of features. My take is quite simple: demand for e-readers will taper off if they continue to use proprietary formats.

Here's how I see the e-reader market as it stands between the two current top-tier devices, Amazon's Kindle and B&N's nook. Amazon has positioned their device for people more inclined to want technology over longevity by using a proprietary format, no problem for magazine or newspaper subscribers, but horrible for avid book readers that might actually use a good chunk of memory to house their libraries--the same avid readers that Barnes & Nobles is hoping to snag with the nook, which uses open standards (Epub, pdf, eReader) and offers a cute little lending option that allows nook users to share books with other nook users for 14 days.

Enter Apple. They're just sitting in the background and sharpening their talons. It's rumored that Apple doesn't want to participate in the e-book world, obviously because they are above all that nonsense, but for the helluvit, let's just assume Apple is lying; let us assume they plan to make a go at the e-book market once they introduce their tablet early next year. Who would be their target readers? Answer: Tech-savvy casual readers, who want eye-popping color for magazine subscriptions and newspapers. Compare that to the current 16-shades-of-gray E Ink technology in the Kindle and we're talking the difference between black & white television and Blu-ray. In this sense B&N will be free to nab up hardcore readers that are looking for a device to a) offset limited shelf space b) reduce the number of books carried while traveling c) are technical savvy people who are also avid readers.

Some of you may be reading this and saying, I own a Kindle and I read a lot, so you're a dumb ass. I am a dumb ass, but that's besides the point. I'm not saying the Kindle is not used by avid readers, I'm saying that Amazon has done a poor job of positioning the device for avid readers. You have a company promoting a device that can store thousands of books ... but only if you purchase every single one of those books from them.

So is the nook the Kindle killer? Nope. But if Amazon isn't careful, they're gonna pit themselves up against Apple, and that, I fear, would be a slaughter.

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