It's Barnes & Noble, not "NOBLES"...

E-readers... When I saw the Kindle I thought, "That's a great idea. That's going to kill." I didn't want one, but I knew it would sell well and it would be the next big thing. I was right. Being that I buy 90% of what I read from Half Price Books, I figured an e-reader was on the bottom of my needs list. A year later, Barnes & Noble comes out with the Nook. I fell in love... I asked for it as a Christmas gift, but got the shaft. I put it out of my mind for a while. [EDIT: My wonderful wife would like me to point out that I did NOT get shafted as Christmas last year, I merely did not receive a Nook]

Now, I've been keeping track of e-reader hardware for a long time. When the Nook came out something grabbed me. It was probably the color touch screen controls. I wanted to get my hands on them, but never got around to it. Fast forward to a year later.

I saw my friend's nook and I played around with it. It "kindled" a new e-reader fire in my belly. I saw the utility and the general savings of the product. i could carry all my books everywhere. TEXTBOOKS would be in the palm of my hand, with the added bonus that I didn't have to read off an LCD (which I do 8-10 hours a day and my eyes are fatigued all day). E-paper is amazing. I think it's just a very fine black and white LCD (you know, like in the Tiger Electronics handheld games) with a much easier to read screen.

Even with those advantages, I still needed more push. What's that? Books written prior to 1923 are free because they're not copyrighted? SIGN ME UP! Almost everything I read was written before the 20th century!

Even though I loved the Nook, I researched for a few weeks the differences between Kindle and Nook. I looked at other e-readers and tablets and knew that LCD was not an option. Sony has an e-reader similar in price but I don't like it for two reasons. One, the screen is only 5", and two... well, it's a Sony product. I don't get along with Sony products at all. Their proprietary memory and software is almost always junk, and always incompatible to the point of frustration. I just won't buy any of their computer gear or gadgets.

After a long battle I came down to these fundamental differences between the current Kindle and the Nook.
Nook:

1. Touchscreen LCD interface
2. Uses EPub format (makes libraries accessable)
3. Can buy books from Google now
   

Kindle

1. Faster e-paper screen (pearl)
2. Vastly superior battery life (roughly 3x's Nook)
3. Slightly cheaper e-books than Nook

When I weighed the options, and the fact that Nook was $10 more... things seemed even. Eventually I decided to buy the Nook. I figured that since I could walk in and buy it, I could walk in and return it without paying shipping fees if I didn't want it.

My initial reaction was one of great disappointment. Barnes & Noble's website made it prohibitively difficult to access free books and materials by displaying a very small result of search options, and clogging said results with 'free chapters' of books that aren't free. Actually, i was pissed. But then I rummaged through Google's book site and it was all better on the free front. Yay

My next task was to see about library support. First I had to get a library card from my local library, then bring it to the bigger library in the 'city'. I, well, I haven't gotten around to that. I've been too busy reading Lord of the Rings. Does this mean that I should be nixing the whole 'Epub' argument for Nook ownership??? I think it might. If I don't miss something, I never needed it, right??

Reading on the Nook easy, page turning takes a second, but it's not annoying. Browsing the contents of the Nook takes some time and the interface isn't as practical as we're led to understand. After poking around for a while I got the hang of how the non-reading interfaces work. Browsing your library is sluggish at best. The included browser is surprisingly good, though. That is, unless you need to enter data. That's painfully slow. The delay from touching a virtual key to it registering to appearing on the screen is a second or two, and it's very annoying. I tried the browser on a plane ride and found that it was quite usable with AirTran's sluggish internet. It just fit!

Some bad points that I've noticed are that the Nook freezes. The device doesn't respond fast to anything you do so you're often pressing buttons trying to wake it up (and get rid of Oscar Wilde's portrait) when you finally give up and shut it off and wait the two minutes for it to load anew. This happens every few days. Enough to be annoying.

The next issue I take is that I don't get the week of reading B&N says I should. More like 2 days. Maybe it needs to be discharged and charged a few times to 'exercise the battery', but my trial period isn't long enough to do that.

Finally, and most disturbingly, there is a screen anomaly in the shape of some sort of bubble that formed under the screen. It reflects light in a jarring way and is big enough to be distracting at all angles and times. I don't know what B&N says about that in the warranty, but nothing has spilled on the device or touched it otherwise.

So it's looking more and more like the Nook could go back to the store... But then I remember that Google's marketplace doesn't work with Kindle! Amazon has their own file format, and so Kindle sits all on its own, unable to read the industry standard files..

There is hope, however. Converting DRM-free e-books to pdf is pretty trivial, so if i get some free books from Google, I can convert them with little to no hassle, and read on a Kindle.

As it stands, I'm heavily leaning on returning the Nook and buying the slightly cheaper, longer lasting, slightly faster page-turning Kindle 3. In fact, I just ordered Kindle and Nook will go back on Monday. Sorry Nook!