In place of the writing responses today, I’ll use this space to talk about the Nook. We will return to our normal schedule next week with the writing prompt responses.
As I mentioned yesterday, my Nook arrived yesterday. After charging the ereader for a few hours, I took it off the charger and started to try it out.
Right off the bat, I was impressed that I was able to access the online store from my rural house. Some cell phone companies don’t have access at my location, so I was glad to see the Nook worked just fine.
After registering my Nook, the first thing I wanted to try was looking at my free copy of The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell. When I ordered my Nook, I had noticed (by way of the huge advertisement on the Barnes & Noble web page) that they were giving away a free electronic copy of Malcolm Gladwell’s book to those that preordered a Nook. While this wasn’t a vital part of my decision, I did enjoy Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, so I was looking forward to reading The Tipping Point.
However, when I turned on my new Nook, I discovered that the book wasn’t there. Where was my copy of The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell?
I immediately called Barnes and Noble’s service line. As it turns out, apparently the preorder offer was limited to the first 10,000 customers, and I didn’t make the cut. However, the service person I spoke with was kind enough to offer a $10 gift card to offset the cost of purchasing the book. It would have been nicer to receive the book immediately, but at least they were willing to put forth an effort to make it right.
The next thing I tried was searching through the online store using the Nook. The refresh rate was not impressive, but considering that this is e-paper, the refresh rate can’t be expected to match a typical computer monitor.
When I tried to search for Eats Shoots & Leaves by Lynne Truss, I found that the keypad on the touch screen did not work well with my relatively large fingers–I kept hitting the wrong key, which quickly became frustrating. I’d like to use a stylus instead, but after some quick Google searches, it appears that there are none that currently work with Nook. The refresh rate definitely has an impact here–you need to wait a second or so between each key press if you want to see whether you’ve made an error.
I ended up going back to my Netbook and using that instead to order the book. The process moved fairly smoothly since I could easily hit backspace on my keyboard. When I went back to my Nook, I found that the book showed up almost immediately after scanning for updates to my B&N library.
Positive aspects so far:
Opening and reading an ebook is intuitive and easy on the eyes. I was fairly pleased with the resolution, and reasonably pleased with the response from support. I was also pleased with the overall integration between the B&N store and the Nook.
Negative aspects so far:
The keyboard is almost unusable for adult fingers. Barnes and Noble really needs to release a stylus that works with the keyboard. Refresh rates on the screen are frustrating when filling out fields, but using a stylus would certainly help.
Overall impression so far: B+
Now I’m off to reread Eats Shoots & Leaves! I’ll let you know on Monday what other features I’ve tried, including transferring over manually created PDFs of some of my own work and making notes on that work.
