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Posts Tagged ‘nook’

The Nook and Book Lending

October 24, 2009 | Author Tiffany

There have been many questions surrounding the Barnes & Noble Nook and book loaning. Someone over at the Barnes & Noble help board asked the question:

The FAQ says, “You can lend many of your eBooks one time for a maximum of 14 days.” Does this mean you can only loan the book out once, PERIOD, and once you have loaned out a book you can NEVER loan it out again, even after the 14 day loan period expires?

The reply from Kristin S. (administrator) is this:

Yes, that’s correct. You can loan each eBook (providing the publisher allows this) one time only, for a period of 14 days, to any B&N eReader-supported device, including nook, Mac, PC, iPhone, iPod Touch, and BlackBerry. During this time you cannot read the eBook yourself. Hope that helps, and thanks for your question.

As I suspected, the lending feature is indeed dependent on publishers allowing their books to be shared, much like the kindle Text to Speech feature is dependent on publishers. Given the current attitude of many publishers towards e-books, I wonder just how many will be allowing their books to be shared? On top of that you can only share it once of the lifetime of owning that book? And only for 14 days? Yes many of us bookaholics read a book in a day or two, but most mortals need more than 14 days to finish a book. It will be interesting to see how this feature plays out once the device is released.

Posted in Book Chat, News | Tags: e-books, lending, nook, share ebooks | 1 Comment »

E-book Excitement

October 21, 2009 | Author Tiffany

Lots of hoopla over the new Barnes & Noble devise the nook. I admit – it looks cool! I am not about to drop my kindle for it, but I am interested in how things will develop now that Amazon.com has some real ereader competition.

Features that I like:

Expandable memory – my Kindle 1 has this, but they did away with it on the Kindle 2. B&N has obviously realized that was a mistake by amazon.
Lend a book to a friend…. I love this in theory, but am curious as to how this works out. I wonder if it will go the way of the Text to Speech function of the kindle and publishers will be able to ask that it is not available on their ebooks.
PDF Support – I read a lot of pdfs on my kindle now, but always have to convert them first. It would be handy to skip that step.

Dislikes:

B&N claims about ebook availability – they are just tweaking the statistics. They are including free public domains in their numbers to make it look like they have more books than amazon.com. Sneaky sneaky!
touch screen – just not a fan. fingerprints everywhere… I feel like I am constantly cleaning my ipod touch and I would be really annoyed to have that problem with an e-reader.
No Word documentation support. very odd to have pdf support but leave off something as easy as word documents.
Battery drain – The LCD screen is going suck power from the battery like a dyson vacuum. I wonder if you can turn it off? My kindle battery takes FOREVER to die and I take advantage of it.
Sales Tax. Amazon doesn’t charge sales tax on ebooks in most states because it isn’t required to. Barnes and Nobles have brick and mortar stores in most states and I assume they would have to add sales tax onto ebook purcahses – 5-8% added cost to each book. ouch!
The wireless network feature on the nook only works while you are in a Barnes and Nobles store. Outside of the stores you use the AT&T network to access only BN.com – My kindle wireless(through sprint) works everywhere and comes with a web-browser so I can access more than just the amazon store.

A closer look at the nook features by zdnet.com can be found here

On a related note, Today I found an interesting blog post on book pricing and availability…It is certainly not scientific, but by comparison Amazon is way ahead in pricing and availability.
http://blog.gideonaddington.com/2009/07/the-land-of-ebooks/

Posted in Book Chat, Kindle Talk | Tags: ebook, kindle, nook | 5 Comments »