Wednesday, March 10, 2010

Barnes and Noble's New E-Book Reader, nook!

How fitting for E-Book week that I went out to Barnes and Noble and bought their nook.

Yes, I finally bought the nook. I knew I wanted to buy one, but I had just been waiting. And waiting. And waiting. Before I finally just decided to buy it, and I must say that this thing (yes, I used the word thing) is absolutely amazing!

To start out, it's extremely light, so it's not like you're carrying around this giant bulky thing that's more trouble than it's worth to carry around with you. No, it's light, and all the surfaces are nice and flat so you don't have to worry about hitting buttons or knobs breaking off or anything like that (which is really nice since I'd be terrified that something would break off of it if it could).

So on to the mort interesting aspects of it that I'm sure you're all dying to know about!

I will admit that I haven't tried to upload any documents to it yet (I'm taking it one step at a time), but I was told when I bought it that it can upload PDF files, which is a giant plus to me. But as for the EBooks, it's a really simple process. When you first turn on the nook, they ask you to register it to your Barnes and Noble account. Then...

Here's the awesome part!

You can either buy the EBooks you want to read straight from the nook itself, or you can buy them from the Barnes and Noble website and, since your nook is registered to your account, they end up on your nook. I'd say that's pretty convenient if you ask me. And I was also surprised at how easy it was. Like I said, haven't tried uploading anything onto it yet from my computer, but as of right now, it seems very easy to work.

Plus, probably the most important part of the entire thing, is that it's really easy to read from. It takes a while to get the hang of the page turning method, but it really is really easy and really nice to read from. You can also adjust the size of the font to fit your liking - from small to extra large. And let me just say that the extra large really is extra large. So if you have trouble reading the small print, there shouldn't be too much to worry about.

Lastly, the screen is just fantabulous! I have yet to have the light glare on it excpet when I am purposefully trying to make the light glare on it just to see what happens. And even then it's not a bad glare! I'd say that's a pretty nice plus considering all the things that can cause glare now. It can be rather frustrating, I must admit. But that has not been an issue, so yay!

As of right now, I just have good things to say about it. It did take me a couple hours off and on to figure out what I was doing (as with every new electronic a person buys), but I was able to solve them all pretty quickly.

So that's my exciting blog on my new nook. Now I just need to buy a bunch of EBooks to fill it up...

(And pictures may be coming... I suppose that depends on whether or not I can get them to upload...)

~~ Alyssa Montgomery
Author of Michael Springer