Further to my point above about loaning books out via the Nook, the main problem I have with the feature is you can only loan a book out once. I can, maybe, understand not having access to a book currently on loan to someone, although, honestly, I’d find that annoying, but once the loan period is over and I have access to the book again, I can’t then loan it to anyone else, because I’ve already loaned it once, and once is all you get. This makes no sense to me.
Thanks for all the input, everyone. I’m going to try to find someone who has a Kindle so I can try it. I have a friend who has a Nook but I think I’ll just zip over to B&N at lunchtime this week and check one out there.
Depending on where you live, you might be able to see a Kindle at Target.
I just got a Kindle a couple of weeks ago when the were on sale at Woot! for $149. That price point put it into the “I’ll give it a try and it’s not that big a deal if I don’t like it” category. So far I like it. Reading on it is very easy on the eyes, although the organization of books is a bit haphazard in my opinion. Of course that could be just me not using it in the most efficiant manner. I’ll also slightly disagree on the .pdf reading. At least on my Kindle (6 inch size), reading a .pdf is a pain. You can’t increase the font size, all you can do is zoom in to these preselected levels which require you to constantly scroll back and forth. Very annoying. Other than that minor aspect, I love the kindle.
I read PDFs on the regular Kindle by changing it to landscape, where a page is two Kindle pages. Works just fine.
The banality of evil.
I don’t really care whether their reason was legitimate. The fact that they leave themselves that backdoor, and that they felt justified to use it in any case, is what makes the whole thing creepy. And the fact that they apologized post-fact and promised not to do it again means nothing if they still give themselves the capability within the software.
Think about what it means to say, “well, if I shut off my wireless after I download the book, they can’t sneak in and take it.” If I buy a dead-tree book from Borders, or a CD from Target, I’d be pretty pissed off if they decided that they shouldn’t have sold it to me, and came into my house without my permission to reclaim it. I damn sure wouldn’t be discussing whether I should hide my stuff better, or have a better security system on my house.
This is not just about Amazon of course; Apple and Msrs. Barnes and Noble I’m sure have the same thoughts and opinions about whether you own the stuff they sell you.
That the issue was two Orwell books – perhaps it could have been more ironic if Fahrenheit 451 was included, but not by much…
To me, it makes all the difference in the world.
If someone sells you stolen property in good faith (thinking they have the right to sell it), do you then legally own the property?
I saw one at our local Target, but you can’t test anything to it on display. It just has some sort of splash screen.
Do either of these support the lit format used with microsoft reader? I find that format a lot more “booklike” than pdfs or txt docs, which is a consideration because I read a lot of unpublished stories by people I know online.
Yep, the PDF feature on the Kindle and Kindle 2 is, for some reason, not as robust or as well-implemented as on the Kindle DX.
Although the Kindle doesn’t support the lit format natively, there are free tools you can use to convert your lit files to Kindle’s prc format.
Point taken, but if someone sells you stolen property in good faith and then finds out afterward that it was stolen, do they have the right to break into your house to take it back?
I think, overall, the nook and kindle are similar enough that you’ll be equally happy, whichever you choose. I went with the nook because I got several B&N giftcards which made the nook much cheaper than the kindle for me.
A couple of points about the nook: the touchscreen on the bottom is not quite as silly as it seems: once you’ve got the hang of the scrolling motion, it’s nice to be able to switch font/ size, go to another chapter, look up a word, etc., without having to leave your page. Also, I think Thudlow Boink asked whether it was wasteful; you can actually set the brightness and length of time it stays on, so it doesn’t have to use much power. I have mine set at 40% brightess and 10 sec. shutoff time. The other thing which I didn’t think I was going to care about but have turned out to really like is that, when the touchscreen is “off” (not lit up and in use for menus), you can turn a page by swiping a finger diagonally across the screen. It takes a little getting used to, but I find that for certain positions, like reading in bed, it is easier to do the swipe with my thumb than to hit the button. YMMV.
The only really negatives I have found about the nook are 1) battery life is apparently not as good as the kindle, although it seems to be increasing. The first month or so I had it, I was frustrated by how often I had to charge it; this week, I’ve been looking at it every day to see if it needs another charge but it’s still at like 50%. And 2) The B&N method of creating an eBook wishlist is the most ridiculous, PITA workaround I’ve ever seen - AND it caps your wishlist at 150 books. WTF? My amazon wishlist is 30 pages long, and growing.
One final note - be careful looking at a nook in the store - for some reason, the store version seemed waaaay slower than my actual nook.
There are programs out there that let you convert Kindle books to other formats that you can back up and are untouchable by Amazon.
Still on the fence but I have a feeling will be making a purchase soon. Will the Kindle or Nook read Word .docs as well or ? I’m thinking one of the huge pluses for me would be to read my own Nanowrimo projects that have been sitting for awhile. If I can read those fairly easily in either .doc or PDF format on a 6" Kindle, that would be a huge selling point for me.
Yeah, I was hoping the same thing, but unfortunatly no. You can read ebooks in the native kindle format, or in .pdf format. But there are a ton of free conversion programs out there. I think I use ABC Amber LIT converter to convert everything to a .pdf. I know Amazon has a free program to convert stuff to the kindle format, but I haven’t tried that yet.
Sure you can read .doc stuff on the Kindle. Not in the native format, but I don’t think that matters at all. You can either convert it to text and use the USB cable to put it on your Kindle, or you mail it to your special Kindle email address and Amazon converts it for you and transfers it to your Kindle. There’s a charge for that, but it’s tiny - like 15 cents per MB or something. The most I’ve ever paid is less than a dollar.
I wanted to put in another plug for the Sony. I have the Sony Daily Edition and I love it. It takes epubs or pdfs, and I can use all the features of the eReader (note-taking, in particular) on any files I’ve loaded, regardless of whether I bought them at Sony or not. This is not true for the Nook - you can only bookmark files you didn’t purchase through B&N, not take notes.
I didn’t consider the Kindle because of not being able to directly load epubs, which is the defacto standard for ebooks. I don’t want to mess with converting docs to be able to load them or keep them outside of the cloud.
I took the plunge and purchased a Kindle from Target on Saturday. The deciding factor was that I could convert my Word .docs to it if I want to read my own projects.
Here’s my first impressions:
It took me a little bit to figure out the navigation but not bad at all. I love how light it is - makes reading in bed a breeze. I can’t wait to take it on my upcoming trips. It’s a little too easy to order books - I had to cancel one that I was just looking at and suddenly the one-click buy kicked in. But I’m glad it was easy to reverse.
I like it for reading - I think the only thing I was disappointed in so far (and maybe I just haven’t figured it out yet) is that I’d like to be able to group my books and have the cover show next to the title as opposed to just reading a list of books.
I still think it’s ridiculous what they want to charge you for a book that requires no paper or distribution but I can live with it, I guess. It is very fast when it comes to buying or downloading books.
The author screensavers are pretty cool, I have to say.
Grouping books is fairly easy. At the home screen hit menu. There should be a option that says something like “create a collection”. Not sure about displaying the cover though.