The Kobo Touch, our top pick for casual readers.

A whole gaggle of new ereaders hit the market this month, just in time for the holiday season. We’ve updated our ereader comparison for this new slate: find it here, and find out why we don’t believe the hype about the Nook Tablet, and why the Kobo Touch is our top choice for casual readers.

In other news, we’re taking off for the rest of the week for Thanksgiving. We’ll be back on our regular schedule next week, when we’ll kick off our third annual Best Books series.

See you then, and happy Thanksgiving.

[Chamber Four's ereader comparison]

The update was four months late, first scheduled for January, and those four months, frankly, didn’t help much. I’ve spent the past couple weeks tooling around with the new Nook Color, and while there are definite improvements, nothing has really changed. If you want to root it, you’ll still want to (and here’s how). If you’re not interested in the Nook Color, you still won’t be. And if you were mildly frustrated by its wasted potential (like me), you’ll still be frustrated.

It’s a great device and a great deal—especially compared to the oversized iPad and the overpriced every-Android-tablet-out-there. It’s still great fun to use, it still does movies, it still does books and magazines and Pandora. But, it could be so much more.

When the Nook Color came out, I wrote a post about what I’d like to see in it, or what I thought it had the potential to be. This firmware update addresses some of those issues, but not nearly enough of them; I’ll break it all down in bullet points, after the break.

• Angry birds? Yes, and they are glorious. Seriously, the game plays smoothly and the screen size is ideal. The problem is that Angry Birds is one of only about a half dozen games in the Nook Color app store. This is a common theme: while B&N has thrown open the doors to its private app store, the crowd hasn’t yet arrived. Getting the full Android app store is the main benefit of rooting.

• So what about other apps? There are a few there, emphasis on “few.” Still no Instapaper, Evernote, etc. But there is a note-taking app. Time will tell, but at the pace B&N is going, the Nook Color will be easy to outpace in this department.

• Smoothed edges? The rough spots in the Nook’s interface have been improved, but not eliminated. Syncing between Nook Color and various Nook apps is improved, as is the onscreen keyboard, and the newspapers and magazines have improved navigation.

• “Interactive” books and magazines? B&N’s firmware-update press release mentioned both of these things. They don’t exist, as far as I can tell. A particular annoyance is that you can’t shop by features—for instance, you can’t browse interactive cookbooks. For the record, Barnes & Noble, this is what we talk about when we talk about “interactive” books. Being able to zoom in on magazine pictures doesn’t count as “interactivity.”

• Email? Sure, it’s there and it’s not bad. Wi-Fi only, of course, but that’s what you paid for.

• Comic books? Yes! Well, kind of. There are some out there, about a dozen titles, collected in sets of four to six issues. They’re released as apps by Graphic.ly and iVerse, which means it’s fairly obnoxious to find them and impossible to browse through the entire offering. Still, the available titles are intriguing: they include Irredeemable, one of Aaron’s comic book picks, and Mouse Guard 1152, which Sean didn’t hate. There should be more of these.

• Content interacting? (E.g. reading an article about a band and being able to buy and listen to the band’s music right on the device.) Not a sign of this, not that I was really expecting it. Whoever shucks this oyster will get rich.

• A way to share articles? Nope.

• Tons of content? No, and this is the one that really kills me. There aren’t enough apps and aren’t enough comic books. Possibly this will be improved in the coming weeks and months, like it was somewhat improved in the magazine and newspaper departments after the Nook Color’s initial release. The hardware is plenty good, and the firmware is fine—the primary thing it needs is more content.

• Flash-enabled internet? It’s pretty cool, and it’s great for surfing. I would love a Hulu and/or Netflix app, though.

So, B&N have made strides in certain departments, but show no signs of awareness in several areas that would make this thing awesome. Again, it is what it was when it came out: a great handheld device for readers, with some pretty cool perks. It is not the be-all, end-all of ereaders, and probably never will be.

I would’ve called this update promising if it had happened on schedule, four months ago. That time is telling: it means the total number of device manufacturers fully committed to digital reading is… zero. Apple’s moving backwards, the Kindle just got page numbers (?!), and Kobo picked the wrong horse to cart behind. Barnes & Noble doesn’t seem to care as much as they should, they’re certainly not delivering on their promises, or the promise of their device.

So this is anybody’s race to win. As of now, the Nook Color still has a comfortable lead.

Kids' books are one area that the Nook Color doesn't need to improve on.

A few weeks ago, I reviewed the Nook Color, and found it good, but unfinished. While it has its share of problems, almost every one of them could be fixed with software adjustments and firmware updates. Here’s my wish list for the big update rumored to be scheduled for January.

Smooth edges

The biggest problem with the Nook Color is that its interface needs some smoothing. It sometimes takes an extra tap to wake the screen up, and navigating—especially in magazines—can be laggy and frustrating.

This isn’t the first time B&N has rushed a Nook to market: when the original Nook came out last year (just in time for the holidays), most reviews agreed that its interface was similarly laggy, and in later months B&N improved it markedly. Hopefully that happens again here.

Fix note-taking

Right now, you have to pin each note you take to a patch of text, and the firmware doesn’t distinguish between notes and regular highlights. If it did distinguish, and gave you more note-taking options (like, for instance, taking notes in magazines), it would make this a much more desirable device for students.

I’d also like to see more integration with a word processor—perhaps in the next hardware generation this could even happen through Bluetooth.

Apps – Instapaper, Goodreads, Evernote, Etc.

I desperately want Instapaper on this puppy, especially an Instapaper app that auto-downloads everything you’ve sent to your account, so you could read everything offline, like the way the Nook already does newspapers.

I’d also love to see an Overdrive app for managing library books and library audiobooks, a Goodreads and/or Copia app for social reading, a Google Editions app, and Evernote for proper note-taking. All of these (except probably the Overdrive app) are well within the range of possibility. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Wattpad, Smashwords, Scribd, the list goes on.

Document creation

There’s a cover in the Nook store boasting about an easel design that “creates a solid base for typing on your NOOKcolor’s keyboard.” Sounds awesome, but what the hell are you typing? As of yet, there isn’t even a note app. I’d love to be able to write in a proper word processor, even if it was bares bones. Even a simple Notes feature would be enough.

More content

So far, about 20 newspapers are available, and less than 100 magazines. I’d like to see a lot more, please. I especially want to see smaller niche magazines represented—right now, the magazines are mostly general interest titles with large circulations, like GQ and Glamour—I’d like to see smaller magazines and lit mags be able to publish in the B&N store. I’d also like to see…

Comic books

I’m not a comic book guy, but I would buy one entire buttload of comics on this thing. When this happens, and it will, check out Chamber Four’s comics correspondent Aaron Block to find some good books to read.

Mixed content

The official Nook Color commercial features, at one point, a woman reading a cookbook with a video embedded in it, showing her how to whisk. I would like that cookbook, please. I’ve tried looking for it in the Nook store, but I can’t find it, if it even exists. B&N needs to frontload the kind of content that really shows off this device.

Of course, I don’t want books to become series of small movies, but I do want to see that kind of thing from magazines and newspapers.

More support for content interacting

Specifically, there should be an option next to “Look up in Google” and “Look up in Wikipedia” for “Look up in B&N store.” That way, if you’re reading a book review, you can easily find the book. You should also be able to do this with music and even movies. There are millions of other ways different kinds of content could interact, but I think this one makes sense as the ground-breaker, because it carries the most financial incentive to get the ball rolling.

A way to share whole articles

I want to be able to save articles from newspapers to read later, or be able to send article recommendations to friends. If you share something on Facebook, the link leads to the book or newspaper in the Nook store, which is pretty self-serving and not very customer-serving.

To put this another way: one of my favorite sections in the New York Times is “Most E-mailed.” If you skip a few days of the paper, that section comes in every edition, so you can always find the most interesting articles you missed. But: if everybody had a Nook Color, that section would disappear, because there’s no way to email an entire article to a friend.

That’s about it. A modest list for a first update. I’ll check back in after the update comes out to see how it stacks up.

The home screen features a desktop with resizable icons for books and periodicals, and a "Daily Shelf" row at the bottom where new content automatically appears.

The Nook Color is Barnes & Noble’s new full-color LCD ereader, retailing now for $250 (more specs below). Basically, it has phenomenal potential, but it’s unfinished, which means we don’t yet know exactly how good it will be. 90% of the problems I have with the device could be solved with firmware fixes—I’m guessing B&N will roll out a major new firmware update in January, with the launch of the Nook Color app store. But I’m also guessing they won’t be able to fix every one of these problems.

Right now, this is still a very appealing ereader—and it is an ereader. If you’re looking for a tablet computer, get an iPad. But if you want a device for reading, and you want to read books, newspapers, and magazines, the Nook Color is well worth the money, and it’s only going to get better.

Let’s get into the details.

Hardware/Screen/Physicality: A

The screen is fantastic. It’s the perfect size (7″) for both reading and watching movies, and the touchscreen is very accurate—you can hit even tiny links on webpages with ease. I’ve read reports of people’s screens freaking out sometimes and registering a series of ghost taps. I believe that’s because the screen is so sensitive, residue left by your fingers can actually be read as a touch. Put it to sleep and clean the screen, and you should be fine.

Now, all that said, the screen is not E-Ink. I like E-Ink ereaders, and if I only read novels, I’d prefer one. But the trade-off for a bit more eye strain is tempting: LCD offers better contrast, much faster page-turns, more interactivity, and color content, such as some really beautiful magazines. I’ll take that trade in a heartbeat, and if you’re on the fence, you should take it, too.

The rest of the Nook Color’s hardware is good; it’ll never be quite as good as the iPad, but it’s plenty fast enough for reading. The hard drive is roomy: 8 Gb onboard, plus a Micro SD card slot for even more space.

And this thing feels great in your hand. Some reviews have claimed it’s too heavy; I don’t think so. It’s a bit heavier than a hardcover, but unless you’re holding it at arm’s length all day, I think you’ll adjust.

The only true hardware downside that I see is that the external speaker is pretty crappy. But there’s a headphone jack, and really you can’t expect much from an ereader’s external speaker.

Battery: B+

The Nook Color “battery problem” got blown way out of proportion when the device was first announced. Sure, it could always be better, but I’m an avid reader and I’ve taken several 5-hour+ trips with this thing—I’ve never had to recharge before I was done for the day. The battery is rated at 8 hours with WiFi off. Unless you’re on a cross-continental flight or you read all the time, it will be enough. It’s definitely a charge-every-night kind of deal, but you should probably do that anyway, since that’s necessary for new periodicals to auto-download.

General interface/navigation: B

Another annoyance: you can't sort the books in your library by author or title. You have to put each one on a "Shelf" to keep them straight.

The general interface features a three-screen desktop, where you can lay out and resize cover pictures representing your different books and magazines. There’s a device-wide menu (featuring “Library,” “Settings,” etc.) under a triangle in the bottom bar, and a book icon that takes you back to what you were last reading—one of many reminders that this device revolves around reading. There’s also a bar below the desktop (called the “Daily Shelf”) where new content (like newspapers, magazines, and books you’ve downloaded) automatically pops up. This video gives you a good, no-nonsense tour through the interface.

The interface is good, but could be better, even with just the addition of the classic Android back button. This, like a lot of navigation on the Nook Color, is also a bit laggy.

Book reading: A-

Reading books on this device is pretty straightforward. You can tap or swipe to change the page, and you can open a menu to change chapters, type size, and even the font itself with a lot of books. You can also change the entire look to, for instance, white text on black background for night reading.

There’s no page-turn animation if you like that kind of thing. I prefer tapping to change pages, but swiping is more reliable and less likely to accidentally open the menu.

Books are the device’s “weak spot” since black and white text is supposed to be better on an E-Ink screen. But I like reading books on this device every bit as much as an E-Ink ereader. Obviously, E-Ink is preferable, but until it gets this fast, sharp, and cheap, I’m back on the LCD wagon.

Newspaper reading: B

Newspapers are organized by section, with a list of headlines and excerpts under each section heading.

Some reviewers have complained about the newspaper interface, which consists of a section page like a table of contents, followed by a series of articles in that section. After a week, I’ve gotten fully used to it, and I’m not bothered at all (bonus: there are no ads). But I also read the New York Times, which features the most useful table of contents of all the newspapers I tried (every section in the paper gets a section in the digital edition, whereas in papers like the Washington Post, there are only a few sections: Front page and News, for instance, which makes wading through it more difficult).

Still, I’m  a big fan of the physical newspaper—the only reason I’m keen on the digital edition is because the Times is utterly incapable of delivering to my apartment building without leaving papers on the street outside to get stolen. I’m interested to see what B&N’s rumored newspaper revamp looks like, but if it never gets better, I’m fine with this.

Magazine reading: C+

You can rotate the device to view two-page spreads, and pinch-and-zoom to read captions or see details.

It takes a while to get used to magazine reading on the Nook Color. A magazine is basically a series of JPEGs—you can skim through thumbnails of pages or a list of articles, then you can pinch and zoom to see the full layout, or you can use Article View to pluck the text out of a piece and read it on its own. You have to remember to tap the middle of the screen for the menu, and pinching-and-zooming can be laggy and unintuitive.

Article View pulls the text from any article into one column, and makes it easy to flip to the next article by swiping.

Still, these magazines look beautiful—I’ve already subscribed to several photo-centric magazines like National Geographic, and I tore through several first issues in a few days. Article View works quite well, but panning and zooming the pages themselves can be very frustrating. Most frustrating is how you can zoom in on a picture and then pan too far to one side and accidentally change the page; then you have to page back and start over.

It’s also a shame that you can’t highlight or look up words in magazines. It would be nice to, for instance, be reading a piece in Spin, then be able to sample or buy the album you’re reading about. Hopefully it won’t be long before B & N and content producers figure out some nifty ways to use cross-content ability.

This is yet another thing that could be fixed with a firmware update—as it is now, it’s usable, but that’s about it. Despite all that, I love reading magazines on this thing, and that should tell you a lot.

[Except: The New Yorker is inexplicably unavailable on the Nook Color, which is bizarre since it's available on the regular Nook.]

Kids’ books: A

Kids' books are beautiful and you can tap any piece of text to hear the narrator read that part aloud.

If I had a kid, the Nook Color’s price might be worth it just for the kids’ books. Each comes with its own audiobook, and kids can either read the book themselves or listen to the embedded audio. It’s a simple, phenomenal system.

Shopping/Periodical Selection: C

The shopping interface on the Nook Color itself is fairly frustrating. For all B&N’s hype about recommendations and “Sessalee’s Picks” and whatnot, it’s all fairly useless, and so is the browsing interface. Unless you know exactly what you’re getting, I avoid trying to shop on the Nook itself.

I much prefer using the B&N website on a computer—the process of getting your books is fairly seamless. However, you can’t delete certain things from the Nook itself, like free samples, for instance. You have to go into your library on the website and browse through a long list of everything you’ve bought or sampled, and then delete each one individually. It can also be a chore to “archive” individual issues of newspapers or magazines.

But, the free sample system, a concept I’ve loved for a long time, works great, and is Nookbook-shopping’s saving grace. My method is this: I browse through the B&N website, downloading a dozen or so free samples. I update the library on the Nook, and all the samples pop up automatically in the new content bar. Then I read the samples and can quickly buy and download the books I like. Still, I’d like a better store.

Search, Highlighting, Dictionary, Lookup: A

The dictionary is lightning fast, highlighting is easy and great, and looking things up on Google or Wikipedia is quite useful.

The search is a bit confusing—you have to remember to search from the book menu, not the Nook menu—but otherwise great.

Note-taking/Account Syncing: F

Which of these are notes and which are just highlights? This is one of my biggest complaints about the Nook Color.

So how is highlighting great but note-taking terrible? Well, they’re lumped in together and treated the same. That means that you have to highlight a section of text to add a note to it, but those notes are listed by the highlighted section, not the note you added. It’s a pain to browse back through highlights and see which ones were notes, and then hunt through those, trying to find what you wanted. This is an easy fix, though. I just hope they actually fix it.

Account syncing is basically non-existent. You can’t pull up notes on the desktop app, and while you can pull up the book you were reading on your phone, the bookmark-across-devices is inexact at best. Again, fixable.

Music and Video Playback: B

The music interface is far from intuitive, but once you figure it out, it works about the same as you’d think. A tip: click “Browse” in the upper right to switch to the browsing screen—if you don’t, there’s no way to sort by albums or artists, and the process of building playlists is fairly infuriating.

Video playback is great. You have to sideload videos (and music, for that matter) into the “My Files” section. To play videos, you have to find the specific video in whatever folder it’s in. And if you stop the video, it won’t remember your place. Still, videos are a pleasure to watch, not least because the screen is an ideal size for a movie on a plane.

Library books: B+

B&N treats library books far different from “NOOKbooks”: you can’t put thumbnails of library books on your homepage, and you can’t download them via WiFi. This is not unexpected, and at least B&N allows you to get library books, which is more than you can say for Apple or Amazon.

Web: B+

I’m not entirely sure why reviewers have come down so hard on the web browser. It’s a standard, plain-jane model. It’s not terribly fast, but it’s not slow by any means. It might be nice if you could adjust settings (like whether you default to mobile or regular webpages), but if you’re buying this for its web browser, you’re making a mistake.

Social/LendMe: A-

You can post passages you like to your Facebook or Twitter account, or email them to your Gmail (or other) contacts. It works pretty much as you’d think. The LendMe thing is a neat idea, but I’d like to see more integration with reading communities like Goodreads.

In Summary

Again, we’ve got a solid device with plenty of rough edges. I’m a believer, to the extent that I think this kind of device is the future of ereading. The Nook Color is no iPad, but I’m firmly in the subset that would use a tablet primarily for reading and watching movies, and the Nook Color more than holds its own on both those fronts.

It remains to be seen just how good the Nook Color will become over the long haul, but right now, for an avid reader, it’s definitely worth the money.

More specs:

Nook Color page at B & N

Specs and overview: The Nook Color is a 7-inch color touchscreen Android-powered ereader, retailing at $250. It will ship Nov. 19, and it’ll be in stores soon after that. It has WiFi, but no 3G, and an LCD screen instead of Pixel Qi or Mirasol (which would give it better battery life) because of price considerations and performance.

It’s difficult to get good hard spec numbers right now, especially processor speed and memory capacity, but it has micro SD expandable storage, and it comes with an 8 Gb card (16 Gb cards run about $30). It supports Adobe ePub and “boasts” an 8-hour battery life with WiFi off (I’d say you shouldn’t hope for more than 3-4 hours with WiFi on). Battery life is its weak point, without a doubt.

That said, there’s a whole lot to like here. Despite tech blogs keying on the word “tablet,” this is not a tablet computer, it’s a (possibly excellent) color LCD ereader. Real tablet computers of decent production value are very expensive, like the iPad starting at $500, and the new Samsung Galaxy Tab starting at $600. Anything much cheaper than the Nook Color, like the Pandigital Novel at $180, is too crappy to use. So do not expect the best Android tablet out there, expect a great magazine/newspaper reader, with a few perks.

Weird/cool bonus features: You can now take your Nook to a Barnes & Noble store, and read any part of any ebook in their catalog, for up to one hour a day, at which point, you presumably have to get up and go find the paper copy. With the Nook Color, you can also share passages from books via Facebook or Twitter, and lend (or evidently request to borrow) ebooks from friends.

You can also still get library ebooks, and read your ebooks on your phone or desktop via Nook apps available on most platforms (the Nook apps are quite nice, much better than Kobo in my opinion). However, I have little hope for the dedicated, curated Nook Color app store. Nook apps will not challenge iPad apps anytime soon.

Thoughts on content: One of the things I learned this summer after publishing our fiction anthology is that Barnes & Noble does its content right. I’ve been very skeptical of their ereader endeavors in the past, but they are clearly committed to ebooks, and committed to providing content. The same simply cannot be said of Apple and its lackluster ebookstore. If the hardware holds up, the Nook Color will be outstanding for readers.

The bottom line: If you want a tablet to play games, watch movies, email, Twitter, etc., get an iPad. But if you want a tablet primarily to read—especially to read magazines, newspapers, kids’ books, etc.—then the Nook Color is your clear front-runner. I don’t hold out any hope for a competitive or even decent app store, but the content will be there, in a way it’s not on the iPad.

Feel free to wait until you can lay your hands on one in stores to test its interface; that and its battery are its obvious potential weak spots in the early running. Basically, for the right user, this device makes a whole lot of sense.

Things I’m unsure of: How well will its interactivity work? Will it be able to highlight and note-take in a useful manner, as no E-Ink reader currently can? Will my grandmother be able to use it? If so, the Nook Color could be even better. I initially assumed the Nook Color would have lots of comic books, but haven’t seen confirmation; if no, that seems like a big oversight.

Some more links: Here’s a hands-on video at Engadget. Engadget says it’s sluggish, but the video has me sold. TeleRead has a video of the release event here—I usually hate product launch events, but some crazy dancing pageantry makes the first 3 and a half minutes pretty watchable indeed. (Second half here and Paul Biba’s write-up of the event here.) Various other impressions by ZDNet, Salon, publishing Twittersphere reactions. And the Nook Color page at B&N.

• The Alex was supposed to launch. I haven’t heard anything since, so I’m assuming it did? New to the game: the Ezy, two from ViewSonic, the Kobo. Now you can get a Nook at Best Buy, Amazon might consider doing something similar with the Kindle. And it looks like, despite some snarking, Google’s going to try and compete with the iPad. Sharp’s got a mind to make 3D ereaders; this is probably the same glasses-free parrallax barrier technology they’re utilizing for Nintendo’s 3DS. I’m not sure how much better Helvetica looks in eye-pooping 3D. Finally, if it becomes a reality, The Page could be huge.

• Apple is supposedly being a bit tricksy when it comes to third-party ereaders apps on the iPad. But then again, iBooks could be good for indie publishing. This Alice ebook app looks neato (If you haven’t read Lewis Carroll’s classics, do so now). If you’re in Israel, it doesn’t much matter, though.

• I enjoyed this article about big P Publishing’s woes. (I have an MFA from Emerson, and I wish I didn’t. They exemplify the watered-down publishing industry at its very base level. Rumor has it, teachers can’t fail even atrocious theses–and they certainly exist. Of those hundred books, I’d bet 92 are babytown frolics.)

• Here’s a sneak preview of this month’s Reviews in Haiku:

hey now, Jess Walter!
while we should read your book now
don’t steal our ideas

• Two videos. First, it looks like Mario on a Kindle would suck:

Then, Karl Rove flees from a protest of his Courage and Consequences book tour (no joke about the title needed):

and this is just rad:

]]> http://chamberfour.com/2010/02/24/wednesday-links-2-24-10/feed/ 0 http://chamberfour.com/2010/01/27/wednesday-links-1-27-10/ http://chamberfour.com/2010/01/27/wednesday-links-1-27-10/#comments Wed, 27 Jan 2010 14:13:16 +0000 Sean Clark http://chamberfour.com/?p=6022 pricing strategies and the coming battle between Apple and Amazon ]]>