iPad v. Nook Color: eReading Death Match

By Nico Vreeland, on January 3rd, 2011

[Edit: As several people have pointed out, there are kids' books with audio, available on the iPad as individual apps. So that's a tie, too.

Edits: See books, newspaper, and final thoughts sections, below.]

I had a chance to play around with an iPad over the holidays. Here’s a comparison of the iPad and the Nook Color, which I’ve been reading on for about a month (full Nook Color review here). Obviously the iPad does a lot more than reading, but this post is designed to give avid readers an idea of whether a Nook will be enough for them, or an iPad will be worth the extra money.

And the short answer is: the Nook will be enough. It’s a close fight, but the iPad simply doesn’t seem to care enough about reading to win.

[Note: I only had a day and a half with the iPad; if you're a more experienced iPad user and I got something wrong, let me know.]

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The iPad's more newspaper-like newspaper layout. (Click any picture for full-size.)


Newspapers: iPad wins (for now)

The iPad’s NYTimes app looks more like a real paper, and features big, beautiful pictures and embedded video. Best of all: it’s free (for now). The Times has plans to start charging at some point; once that happens, this will be a much closer race.

The Times app needs an Internet connection to work, where the Nook Color downloads the whole paper so you can read it offline. There’s no archive in the iPad version, only today’s news, and if you want a paper other than the Times, you’re out of luck.

I don’t really care about the layout, to be honest. Some people don’t like the Nook Color’s list-of-articles-style layout, and it could certainly use some navigational help (like a back button). But the iPad layout is basically the same, except for the front page of each section.

Photo essays like this one are awesome, but they take an age to download (after several minutes, only five pictures are available).

I am jealous, however, of the NYTimes app’s multimedia content. I’d like to see the digital edition of the Times include videos, photo essays, and blogs like the iPad version, I’d like to see it download an entire edition to your device like the Nook version. The iPad’s 3G is basically worthless, so you have to read the paper at a WiFi connection.

So: the Nook gives you more papers, and gives you the complete archiveable print versions of them. The iPad only gives you the NYTimes, it needs a WiFi connection and expires too quickly, but it offers a lot of multimedia content. Once price is no longer an issue, the winner of this fight will depend on how you read the paper.

[Edit: People have pointed out that there are other newspaper apps in the iPad store. I searched for a dozen prominent papers and came up empty. The selection is definitely worse on iPad, but I can't comment on the apps I didn't try.]

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Review: The DC/Marvel/Comixology Digital Comics Reader

By Aaron Block, on July 6th, 2010

Two weeks ago, DC Comics announced that they’d entered into a partnership with digital comics leader Comixology to not only provide downloadable titles for the Comixology reader, but also offer it’s own dedicated reader using Comixology software.

DC joins Marvel, Image, Dark Horse, Boom, and nearly 30 other publishers who’ve used Comixology to make a smooth entry into the e-comics field. In fact, DC was the last of the major publishers to sign up, and so the news was followed by a flood of “digital comics have finally arrived” reports, no matter that Marvel, Boom!, and others had done the same thing months before.

But the arrival of DC in the digital market won’t mean much if comics don’t translate well to the new medium. So what kind of reading experience do the DC and Marvel apps (they’re identical, except for the content offered) provide?

The Comixology reader is only one part of the comixology.com hub, a social networking site where comic readers can create profiles, manage “pull lists” of books they’re planning to purchase, rate and review them, read columns, and download podcasts. The reader, currently available for the iPod touch, iPhone, and iPad, allows the user to then purchase digital content directly from the publisher for $1.99 an issue. …
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Great Writing Not In Books

By Nico Vreeland, on June 19th, 2009

It’s easy, as an aspiring writer, to pick up a bad book and take heart that your writing is better than its. The problem with that thinking is that authors these days aren’t competing just against other books, they’re competing for the leisure time of their audience against every other form of entertainment available.

Books have a sizable handicap in this fight. An avid reader might read 50 books a year (or about .025% of the nearly 200,000 titles published every year in the U.S. alone), whereas a casual movie watcher might see 100 movies without really trying, and an avid movie watcher can see almost every movie that comes out.

Most people would rather give up sex than music; the same can be said, I would wager, of few readers with books. With TV, you can get a decent feel for a show in half an hour, without much risk if you don’t like it. If you don’t like a book, you feel tricked and trapped into reading the whole thing.

So the odds of finding a book you’ll like are lower than with other media (and with more risk if you don’t like a book), plus reading lacks the universal appeal of music and the ease of use of TV and movies.

Here are a few examples of excellent writing in non-book media. For aspiring writers, consider this your competition.


Bioshock (video game)

bioshockWriting a video game must be especially difficult. A game doesn’t need a story to be good, but can easily be ruined by an attempt to wedge in a boring, slow-paced drama. The challenge is to write a story that entertains and doesn’t drag, for an audience interested more in submachine guns than subplot.

Bioshock is quite simply the best-written game there’s ever been. 90% of its fun is in premise (it’s relatively short on character, by contrast), but it has such a well-realized world and such an intricate, captivating plotline, that I found myself actually looking forward to the story bits, rather than dreading them like usual.

The game creates not only an interesting world, but a world that’s intrinsic to the playing of the game. The plot isn’t especially non-linear, but it’s immersive and entertaining, and the story has layers of meaning (from the ethics of genetics to the philosophy of choice and identity) that a lot of contemporary novels can’t touch.

It’s simple, dramatic game writing at its best.

Honorable mentions: Grim Fandango (the funniest PC game ever made); the Half-Life series …
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