Wednesday, July 6, 2011

Barnes and Noble and the Great Nook adventure

First up, I am still for the most part in love with my Nook. As a reading device it is great. It is a one trick pony and it does it very well. I am currently reading a book called Brains: How They Seem to Work by Dale Purves. It seemed interesting and I have been very surprised at how good a book it is. Yes, the book is full of technical terms that I am trying hard to wrap my brain around, but it is a very good read. It is fascinating how the field of neuroscience developed since the early days and how much we have learned about the brain and the methods discovered to study the brain, the nervous system, and how it all interacts together. I am a good ways into the book and I am really enjoying it.

I have told myself I will not buy any more books until I finish the first one. I read about study that said it takes longer to read ebooks and in another study, most users never finish reading ebooks. I hope this is not the case. So far I am enjoying the fact there are so many free ebooks and being able to load my PDFs onto the device to read as well. But PDFs do not read as well as epub books. The font clarity is not the same on the Nook and it is not as easy to select text in PDFs. Also it would be good if one could zoom in on images in the book. With the small screen, it would be good to be able to do this. Granted if these pictures were in a paperback book, I would have the same issue.

I do have one big complaint about the Nook though. Barnes and Noble markets books that will only work on the Nook Color. In fact at times it seems they "prefer" I use one of the software ereaders or the Nook Color over the device I purchased. I would be happy if under preferences if I could filter my search so it only shows books that will work on my display. Barnes and Noble offered a free book on Mickey Mantle by Jane Leavy to suck me into the Nook world. It isn't free now. But I added it to My Library looking forward to reading it on my Nook (I started stockpiling free and paid books just to read when my Nook would arrive), but this book can't be read on my Nook (the New Simple Touch Reader one). Even worse, it won't let me download it on my Nook for PC or Nook for Mac. So the book is in "My Library" but is unreadable for me so far. My Android phone seems to have an option to download it but not anything else I have.

So Barnes and Noble, please fix this one small thing. Let me be able to search and only find books that my reader can actually use.

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