Amazon's Kindle is no longer the only e-book story out there. The Seattle retailer's devices still dominate the market, but other companies are responding with their own wireless e-readers.
Last I checked, Sony gets a fair amount of coverage, has a large retail presence with their eReaders, and oh yeah - had offerings on the market long before Amazon's Kindle.
While he's correct in the nook's limited availability, he seems to be confused about Kindle's availability:
Like Amazon's reader, the Nook has limited availability; yesterday, Barnes and Noble's site listed an "expected ship date" no earlier than Feb. 12.
The Nook's problems start with that dual-screen setup. First, having only one screen accept touch input doesn't invites confusion (though going to the next or previous page only requires tapping large buttons on the Nook's sides). Second, because the touchscreen turns off automatically, doing anything on the main screen often requires waking up the other display with a tap of its home button.
I assume he meant that the touch input does invite confusion. The touchscreen does power off, in the interest of saving power, but that timeout is completely controlled - and aside from moving forward and backward in a book, which can be done by a swipe of the touchscreen when it's off) or through next/previous page buttons on both sides of the nook - the touchscreen isn't often needed while reading. The addition of the home button just above the screen helps as well.
It's not as if the Kindle has a screen that's always on... on nook, you hit the touchscreen to turn it on. On Kindle, you hit the menu button and it appears on the e-Ink display. Each takes one keypress and a slight delay. There are some quirks with a nook's navigation - but this isn't one of them!
The color display, with the WiFi receiver, seems to limit the Nook's battery life. A solid day of browsing and reading left only a quarter of a charge.
There's no question the WiFi receiver absolutely destroys the nook's battery life. I leave it off at all times except when in a Barnes and Noble store and get perfectly acceptable battery life. Given the size of book's, AT&T 3G service works perfectly fine to grab new content, as it does on a Kindle.
The Nook's AT&T wireless service never dropped, which is a good thing in light of its inept WiFi interface. Instead of showing available signals, the Nook makes you type a network's "SSID" (that is, name), select its encryption method (quick, do you use WPA or WPA2?) and enter a password on an onscreen keyboard.
Perhaps this was an issue in 1.0 and his unit wasn't yet upgraded? To be honest, 1.1.1 was out by the time my nook arrived, and it detected my home WiFi network automatically, I clicked on the name and entered my password - I did not need to tell it what type of encryption I used.
He does hit a few things perfectly, like complaints about the near crippled book lending feature, the downsides of DRM - but a statement that by supporting ePub they mitigate some of those concerns unlike the closed ecosystem of the Kindle - but I suspect he either had an earlier version of the nook, or just missed a few things. Which does bring a valid point of its own - the nook could be a bit more user friendly out of the box to the uninitiated.
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Some people talk about the Nook's wireless limitations as if they were a temporary glitch, but there is no sign that the Nook will EVER be set up so that you can check the headlines in the NY Times, which you can easily do from my Kindle 2. And that's just an example.
ReplyDeleteRon doesn't mention Kindle for PC, which should allow you to read any of the books you bought from Amazon forever on your PC; in fact, you don't need a Kindle to read Kindle books any more.
The nook's wireless issues in joining WiFi networks were just that - temporary glitches that largely have been patched away. Whether there ever will be a B&N supported web browser remains to be seen. Right now, B&N and Amazon are subsidizing the cost of wireless access - they are paying AT&T by the kilobyte for you. Since it's widely known that Amazon sells many Kindle books at a loss, one might assume B&N is also selling a few titles at a loss to kickstart the industry by virtue of matching Amazon's pricing.
ReplyDeleteThe question is how long that can continue. Will Amazon continue to sell books at a loss for eternity? No. That said, $9.99 is a decent price, considering it's still higher than a paperback - yet still costs less to "produce" than printing a paperback. But to forever subsidize wireless, with the exception of the wireless used for the actual purchase of books - I'm not so sure.
Kindle for PC is a great option, and Ron neglects this and quite frankly many other facts, but I still greatly prefer ADE and ePub. I don't want to read on a PC (or I wouldn't own both a Kindle and a nook and lust after a Skiff and pray Apple's whatever-it-is has some hidden, non-backlit, non-LCD feature in addition to the high definition video we know it's going to support). But the real win with ADE and ePub is being able to read books from B&N... or SONY... or KOBO... or SMASHWORDS (etc...) on a nook, or their Mac software, or their PC software, or their iPhone app, or in Sony's Readers, or the Alex when it ships, or any other number of compatible devices.
To me, Amazon is probably sticking this one out for the next decade or so - I'm probably nitpicking when I worry about obsoletion of the books, but Google Microsoft and the ironically named "Plays for Sure" to see what can happen.
Right now, there's a benefit of being able to shop around. Moving forward, I place more stock in Adobe, the company behind PDF supporting ADE which drives a dozen devices already, and sells their authorization servers to a number of third parties and even promotes the technology as a way to secure PDFs than any one bookseller-cum-hardware manufacturer.
The issue, specifically, with Kindle books are the downloads you make from Amazon.com are keyed to one specific device (software or Kindle), which is why when you logon and ask to download them, they ask you what device they should be for. So if one day the service is discontinued (or they have a new format, new encryption, and your older books are now out of print and not updated to the new format), you can't just buy a new PC and grab that Kindle for PC, it may not authorize the book.
Admittedly, this may be an issue with ADE as well.