Barnes & Noble says it’s readying updated software for its Nook e-reader that will speed it up, improve battery life, fix a screen-freezing problem, and add a Web browser, chess, and sudoku. The update comes more than four months after the Nook shipped to less-than-glowing reviews. Judging from my experience with the e-reader, better performance and fewer interface oddities are the most pressing impressing interface tweaks that it needs–I’m going to try the update and see if if makes the Nook feel more like a 1.0 product.
Tag Archives | Barnes & Noble
E-Reader Companies Ready Their iPad Apps
Amazon is providing a sneak peek of its Kindle reader for the iPad. The page is titled “Kindle Apps for Tablet Computers Including the iPad,” which sounds like confirmation that other new versions for (mostly) still-to-come devices are also in the works–I’m guessing ones for Windows-based Slate PCs and for Android. And judging from the images on Amazon’s preview page, it looks like the apps may be slicker than the sparse and disappointing Kindle apps that the company has released to date.
Kindle will have company on the iPad: The New York Times is reporting that Barnes & Noble is also working on a reader. Engadget says that the Hearst-backed Skiff platform will “almost certainly” show up as well (an assertion for which its source is…me). And then there’s Apple’s own iBooks.
After the jump, a couple of screenshots of the Kindle app. No word on how quickly it’ll show up after the iPad does on April 3rd, but presumably it’s in Amazon’s interest to give Apple’s bookstore as little of a head start as possible.
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A Second Look at Nook
Two months ago, Barnes & Noble shipped its Nook, the most eagerly-anticipated e-book reader since Amazon’s Kindle. I thought it packed a number of nice touches and interesting features but that its software was decidedly rough around the edges, and advised that prospective buyers wait for promised updates before plunking down any money–which they’d have to do anyhow, since B&N was sold out and said it wouldn’t stock Nooks in its stores until it had fulfilled all the initial orders.
This week marks the Nook’s second chance at a first impression. Barnes & Noble started rolling out a software update, 1.2, over the weekend, and says that Nooks will finally arrive at retail in the middle of this week–just in time, it says cheerfully, for Valentine’s Day. I tried the revised software, and it’s a start–the Nook’s interface feels more spritely and less buggy, and some usability issues with the original version have been cleaned up. Icons now make it clearer which books can be lent out virtually for two weeks via B&N’s LendMe feature. (The company says “most” books offer the feature, but only about half of the ones I’ve bought do–notable exceptions include Superfreakonomics and The Four-Hour Work Week.) The Nook now offers some exclusive content and discounts (such as a 10 percent off sale on CDs) when it notices you’re on the Wi-Fi network of one of its stories.
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Your First Look at Nook: The Technologizer Review
That response is the Barnes & Noble Nook, and its arrival this week signals the start of a digital transition for the bookselling wars. The Nook has much in common with the Kindle, from its playful name to the paper-esque E-Ink display to built-in 3G wireless that lets you start reading a book seconds after you’ve decided to buy it. Even the prices–$259 for the device itself, and $9.99 for most bestsellers–are identical.
(Like Amazon and Apple, B&N likes to refer to its creation without a modifying article, and also dispenses with capitals–“nook lets you loan eBooks” rather than “The Nook lets you loan eBooks.” I’ve honored the lack of a “the” in the title of this article, but will blithely ignore it from here on out.)
For all their similarities, the Nook packs more pizzazz than Amazon’s e-reader, in the form of the color touchscreen it uses for much of its navigation. It aims to be more open, letting you read tomes you buy on PCs, Macs, iPhones, and BlackBerries–and even on e-readers from companies other than Barnes & Noble. And it brings back a virtue of dead-tree books that people have taken for granted for centuries: the ability to loan them to pals.
For this review, I got to spend some quality time with a Nook, running the software version which will be installed on the first Nooks to reach customers. As I was finishing up my review, B&N was racing to ready itself for the Nook’s debut this week–a few features weren’t yet up and running, or had rough edges that may be eliminated by the time the first consumers turn on their Nooks for the first time.
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Thinking About a Nook? The Wait is Getting Longer
[NOTE: As a commenter noted, I mangled this news: The December 18th ship date is just for new orders. Corrected…]
Want Barnes & Noble’s Nook e-reader? You’ll need to wait a bit longer than originally expected. B&N had been saying that the gadget would ship in late November, but now is reporting that the new orders for Nooks won’t be fulfilled until December 18th–a few weeks after the first orders will go out.
On paper, the Nook still looks like a formidable competitor to Amazon’s Kindle, with a color touchscreen interface, both broadband and Wi-Fi, a book-loaning feature, compatibility with the ePub e-book standard, and additional clients that Kindle doesn’t yet have (Mac and BlackBerry). I’m looking forward to getting my hands on one. Anyone out there hankering for an e-reader but holding off until the Nook shows up?
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E-Reader vs. E-Reader: Spring Design Sues Barnes & Noble
Back on October 19th, a company called Spring Design introduced an e-reader called Alex. It had two significant features in common with Barnes & Noble’s Nook, which was introduced a day later: Both sport a large monochrome e-ink screen and a smaller touch-sensitive color display below, and both run Google’s Android OS.
Spring Design is now saying that the similarity is too close for comfort, and that it’s suing Barnes & Noble:
Spring Design first developed and began filing patents on its Alex e-book, an innovative dual screen, Android-based e-book back in 2006. Since the beginning of 2009 Spring and Barnes & Noble worked within a non-disclosure agreement, including many meetings, emails and conference calls with executives ranging up to the president of Barnes and Noble.com, discussing confidential information regarding the features, functionality and capabilities of Alex. Throughout, Barnes & Noble’s marketing and technical executives extolled Alex’s “innovative” features, never mentioning their use of those features until the public disclosure of the Nook.
I’m not a lawyer, and have no insight into the backstory here–and while I’ve played a bit with an Alex, I’ve yet to see a Nook in the flesh. So I’m not taking sides. But the two e-readers do look similar (that’s the Alex on the left):
One way or another, I hope this is resolved quickly: The Nook is due to ship late this month, and is, for the moment, the Amazon Kindle’s most promising competitor. Spring’s press release doesn’t say whether its goal is to prevent B&N from shipping the Nook at all
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Plastic Logic E-Reader @ Barnes and Noble
Back before Barnes & Noble announced its Nook e-reader, some folks wondered whether the rumored B&N e-book device would simply be the one from Plastic Logic. It wasn’t. But today, Barnes & Noble and Plastic Logic announced that B&N would be selling Plastic Logic’s QUE in stores and online.
I was startled by the news at first blush, but upon reflection, it makes sense. The QUE has a larger display than the Nook, giving B&N a counterpart to Amazon’s jumbo-screened Kindle DX to sell. It calls itself a PROreader and is aimed at business types. And while we don’t know all of the QUE’s specs, it has enough in common with the Nook–AT&T 3G wireless, Wi-Fi, a touchscreen, and access to all the content in B&N’s online bookstore–that they’ll make sense as a set.
For all of the Kindle’s apparent success–I say “apparent” because Amazon doesn’t release specific sales figures–most of the book lovers in America still haven’t seen an e-reader in person, let alone bought one. (Borders sells Sony’s Reader, but it does so at a lonely little kiosk that I rarely see anyone paying attention to.) We still don’t know how long a future e-readers have, but if Barnes & Noble pours its heart into selling them, it’ll be as significant a moment in the gadget’s history as Amazon’s introduction of the Kindle a couple of years ago.
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Barnes & Noble Unveils Digital Lending
While most folks have fixated on the Nook’s ($259) secondary color screen, compared to the pedestrian and now antiquated Amazon Kindle, the most significant feature of Barnes & Noble’s upcoming Android-based eReader is digital lending. From the Nook FAQ:
With our new LendMe technology, you can now share from nook to nook. But it doesn’t stop there. Starting Nov. 30th, you can lend to and from any device with the Barnes & Noble eReader app, including PC, Mac OS, BlackBerry, iPhone™ and iPod touch. All you need to know is your friend’s email address. You can lend many of your eBooks one time for a maximum of 14 days. When you use our LendMe™ technology, you will not be able to read your eBook while it is on loan, but you always get it back.
We’ve previously seen some minor forays into digital media sharing (Welcome to the Social, MusicGremlin) and I had proposed a single license transfer model. Yet this appears to be the most consumer friendly and practical implementation. When combined with in-store wireless book browsing, the Nook experience (on sale 11/30) appears to closely mirror how we interact with physical media. However, B&N’s ambiguous language (”many” “up to” “a maximum of“) has me wondering what sort of lending policy variation we’ll see on a per title basis. And, if B&N is able to license content sharing from the publishers, you know Amazon will most likely implement similar functionality in the near future (along with another price drop?). But they better move quick before I pick up a pair of Nooks.
After the jump, some gratuitous product shots.
(This post republished from Zatz Not Funny.)
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Hey, Nook! Barnes & Noble’s E-Book Reader is Official
The salient details had all leaked out already, but now they’re real: Barnes & Noble has unveiled its e-book reader. It’s called the Nook, it packs both a 6″ e-ink screen and a color touch one below, and comes both 3G and WiFi, 2GB of memory, and an SD slot. The Nook will offer both bestsellers and other new releases (“many” at $9.99) and over a million titles in total, including free public-domain works. It costs $259–the same as Amazon.com’s cheapest Kindle–and is due to ship by the end of November.
Oh, and it syncs with Barnes & Noble’s e-reading software for PCs, Macs, iPhones, and BlackBerries, and has a lending feature that lets you virtually loan an e-book to a friend for two weeks. Let’s op
As with Spring Design’s Alex, the Nook’s two-screen design feels like a kludge to deal with the deficiencies that both e-ink and color LCDs still have. (The color display has an impact on the Nook’s battery life: ten days on a charge, vs. fourteen for the Kindle.) But maybe it’s an elegant kludge–I look forward to getting my hands on a Nook soon.
The single thing about the Nook that I’m most excited about is something kind of mundane: Like Sony’s Readers–but unlike the Kindle–it supports the industry-standard ePub format, and therefore doesn’t render your book purchases worthless if you someday decide to switch to an electronic reader made by someone else. I’m a mostly happy Kindle owner, but the current explosion of interesting alternatives from other companies leaves me hesitating each time I’m about to plunk down money for an e-book. I wonder how long it’ll take until Amazon decides that its proprietary book format is a drag on sales?
(Footnote: I’m still not clear whether the fact that the Nook and Sony Reader both support ePub means that I can just move my books back and forth starting right now. But that’s the direction the whole industry needs to go, and it can’t happen soon enough.)
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Barnes & Noble Entering the E-Book Fray?
I like these rumors: The Wall Street Journal is reporting that bookstore behemoth Barnes & Noble will soon start selling its own e-reader device, and Gizmodo has a tip that said device will run Google’s Android OS. For all the things that are good about Amazon’s Kindle, it suffers from being a sophisticated electronic device designed by a company whose expertise doesn’t lay in designing sophisticated electronic devices. By going with an existing operating system, Barnes & Noble could avoid doing a lot of heavy technical lifting, and would be able to leverage all the things that Android is already capable of doing.
B&N, not surprisingly, isn’t confirming the scuttlebutt. It told Reuters:
We have made no announcement about an electronic reader…We believe readers should have access to books in their digital library from any device, anywhere and anytime.
The company is indeed putting its digital eggs in multiple baskets: It’s powering e-book stores for the iRex and Plastic Logic devices, and has released an iPhone app. Unlike Amazon.com, it’s supporting the ePub standard, which will let you buy a book from B&N and read it on any other ePub device, including ones that the company has nothing to do with.
At the moment, Amazon remains the only superpower of the e-book world (well, maybe Sony too, but let’s see how its latest round of devices do). Consumers will benefit if there’s at least one other company that comes out with a really spectacular device and does a spectacular job of selling it. Maybe Amazon’s recent Kindle price cut and international rollout were pre-emptive strikes against an imminent B&N reader?