A couple weeks ago I decided to buy myself an e-reader. After researching for several hours, it came down to Amazon’s Kindle vs Barnes & Noble’s Nook. In the end, I went for the Nook. It seemed to have more features I was looking for (you can replace the battery), even though the two really are very comparable, down to the price of $259.
I had been reading a lot of PDF’s on the computer and it was really straining my eyes. On the Nook, everything looks fantastic (except for one PDF which had some trouble, I think it had a font that the Nook was having trouble recognizing) and very similar to reading a book. It is easy to load up PDFs and Word Docs by plugging the Nook into the computer.
I love to read before bed. The only problem is, I often get comfortable reading one page and then completely have to re-position myself to read the next page. With the Nook, everything is on the one screen so once I am comfortable I am all set to read until I fall asleep! The Nook also goes into a screen saver mode, so I won’t be completely wasting battery life should I fall asleep before turning the Nook off for the night.
Barnes and Noble’s online store has quite a few free e-books. I probably made a mistake “choosing a book by its cover” (and title) but when I ordered the Nook (and awesome tangerine back panel! I love making my electronics orange lol) I picked out a couple. They came pre-loaded on to my Nook and the first one I read was only 10 pages. A nice little something to read before bed. However, it had a couple grammatical errors and was just a horrible story all together. I then realized why the book was free! haha. (I think I can write something better than it – maybe some day I will be a published e-book author!) Since that book I have read a couple more, and they weren’t much better. I purchased a few more, mainly to see how the Wi-Fi works to transfer it from my online account on to my Nook and they all seemed to transfer without issue, though I haven’t gotten around to reading any yet. A lot of them are romance novels, so I guess I shouldn’t be expecting something fantastic out of them in the first place – as those are more for fun, quick reads! (Though the Nook did come preloaded with 3 ‘classics’ I think they were Little Women, Dracula and Pride and Prejudice. We’ll see if I ever get around to reading those! haha Although I did read Little Women in 5th grade!)
While the Nook is a great alternative when reading in bed and reading PDFs, I don’t think I will be giving up regular books all together. I am still in the middle of reading a book about Classic Rock songs (which reminds me, I should take the time before bed tonight to finish that one up!) and I am sure there will be “must reads” that pop up that I won’t be able to buy as an e-book so I’ll have hit the library or bookstore… but until then, the Nook has been serving me well!